APT (film)

APT (Hangul: 아파트; RR: Apateu) (released as 9:56 in Singapore) is a 2006 South Korean horror film, directed, produced, and written by Ahn Byeong-ki and starring Ko So-young. It is based on a comic by Kang Full. The name APT is from the English word meaning apartment. The film had 644,893 admissions nationwide.

Plot

Se-jin Oh, a lonely young career woman, lives in a high-rise apartment building in a Seoul suburb, and sometimes watches her neighbors through binoculars for amusement. Taking the subway home one night near Christmas, a woman dressed in red throws herself in front of the train, attempting to drag Se-jin with her. The dead woman haunts Se-jin, though she doesn't know it. However, she does notice that the lights across the way flicker mysteriously at exactly 9:56pm every night—often accompanied by an apparent suicide.

Se-jin is befriended by Yoo-yeon, a wheelchair-bound woman abused by her caregivers, several of whom are among the victims. Yoo-yeon gives Se-jin a puzzle cube, noting it can help to forget the pain for a while. Se-jin attempts to influence her neighbors, begging them to not turn their lights off before 10 pm. This puts her in conflict with police detective Yang, who learns that many of the victims have identical keys to an apartment. The apartment that matches the key, 704, is Yoo-yeon's -- but Yang finds the resident is Shin Jung-soo, a social recluse with long black hair, who attacks Yang, but denies having committed any murders.