Lucky, Apartment (럭키, 아파트)

Lucky, Apartment (럭키, 아파트) (also known as Leogki, apateu) 👏, dir. Kangyu Garam (강유가람), 2024, South Korea, 96 min., in Korean with subtitles
Thursday, June 26, 2025, 1:00 pm, Roxie Theater
🇺🇸 U.S. premiere
⚠️ content advisory: homophobic language

Lucky, Apartment (럭키, 아파트)

Even in 2025, South Korea offers no legal protections whatsoever for same-sex couples, in life or in death. No marriage equality, no domestic partnership, nothing. The society remains deeply biased against LGBTQ people, still viewing them as moral deviants and a danger to children. Against that backdrop, we meet Seon-woo (Son Soo-hyun, in the white shirt) and Hee-seo (Park Ga-young, in the dark shirt), a lesbian couple of nine years, who have managed to buy a modest apartment. Seon-woo has been sidelined from her gig work coaching children’s sports, so she is at home most of the day while Seon-woo is out climbing the corporate ladder in all its soul-crushing gloom. They both have to remain deep in the closet, or risk backlash from family, neighbors, work, and random passersby.

Seon-woo begins to notice a nasty odor that seems to be emanating from the apartment directly below. The apartment building’s management and other owners seem much more concerned with avoiding a scandal that might depress their property values than with finding out what happened to “the flowerpot lady” in #1310. Hee-seo’s boss seems to be setting her up to fail, even without the excuse of knowing her big secret. Her brother-in-law repeatedly tries to fix her up with a blind date, but her sister is too afraid of her in-laws’ reaction to take the chance of telling her husband. It’s a pressure cooker, with the open question of whether Seon-woo and Hee-seo will make it through as a couple.

Kangyu Garam captures the bleakness of being in a deep, dark closet as outside pressures mount. The neighbors and family members are entirely human in their inhumanity, with only a narrow ray of light from the younger generation. Indeed, my reservation in giving this film a “must see” is that it is so relentlessly downbeat, almost to the very end. Highly recommended.

• IMDb (as Leogki, apateu) • trailer • official website •