What is expelled from the norm returns as spectral: the queer is the ghost of heteronormative society.
(José Esteban Muñoz)
With Lucky Apartment, the director does not simply tell a story of relational crisis; she constructs a cinematic device that questions the very matter of queer existence in a society that systematically denies recognition, memory, and space. The film moves on the threshold between the visible and the unheard, between what manifests on the surface and what decays in the foundations of daily life.
The story revolves around Sun-woo and Hee-seo, a thirty-something lesbian couple, whose shared life is eroded by the seemingly trivial experience of a bad odor coming from the apartment below. But what initially seems like a simple olfactory disturbance soon reveals itself as an epiphany of queer precariousness: the odor is the real that returns, the intrusion of what bourgeois normality tries to suppress with perfumes, silences, and condominium rules.
The decomposition of an invisible body — that of an elderly woman, presumably queer as well, who died without anyone to claim her — becomes the pivot around which themes of abandonment, systemic homophobia, and the structural loneliness that non-normative lives are destined to face revolve. In the absence of legal and social recognition, even death becomes exile: the woman's partner, Jeong-nam, has no rights over the body of her loved one, which becomes the property of the state, of emptiness, of oblivion.
Kangyu constructs a radical reflection on dwelling, not only as a physical space but as an ontological condition. The apartment, the quintessential place of domestic security, transforms into a symbolic battlefield: while Hee-seo tries to maintain a respectability that allows her to survive in a patriarchal corporate environment, Sun-woo allows herself to be invaded by the uncanny, refusing to ignore the stench — that is, the truth that society wants to keep hidden.
The metaphorical narrative splits: on one side, the olfactory thriller, on the other, the existential drama. And it is in the transition between these two registers that space opens for an unexpected tenderness, a possibility of care that arises not from resolving the conflict, but from accepting shared vulnerability. Sun-woo and Hee-seo symbolically bury the deceased woman, creating a small secret mausoleum to pass down her memory. In this gesture, care becomes resistance, and memory becomes a form of posthumous justice.
Lucky Apartment is a work that demands to be worn rather than interpreted. In an era where LGBTQIA+ rights continue to be contested, and in a context — the South Korean one — where legal recognition is still fragmented, the film offers no solutions or proclamations but shows the irreducible complexity of queer living in a world that would prefer this reality to be transparent, neutral, silent, without recognition, let alone rights.
With a gaze that blends documentary rigor, poetic imagination, and political urgency, Kangyu Ga-ram opens a vision and, at the same time, guards its pain as a form of knowledge. A necessary portrait of our time: not only for what it tells, but for the way it forces us to feel what usually has no voice — or, in this case, what has no smell.
The invisible is not what cannot be seen, but what is chosen not to be looked at.
(Jacques Derrida)
22° Asian Film Festival
