Claustrophilia

Claustrophilia tells the story of a woman who loses her mind under a state of enforced confinement, with disastrous consequences.

The film explores the idea of enforced confinement, and how the mind changes as a result. While enforced confinement often leads to a more fragile state of mind, this film asks what happens when a person grows to enjoy their confinement. In Claustrophilia, the protagonist comes to prefer the confinement of her apartment to the freedom of the outside world, while at the same time suffering from a disintegration of mind that develops from a narrowing of one’s world view.

In confinement, one’s perception of time changes, which is also noted by the filmmakers in their attempt to convey a certain circularity of time.

The purpose of this film is to examine the ways in which enforced confinement affect us. During the global coronavirus pandemic, hundreds of millions of people have experienced this first-hand, the directors included, and there is without doubt a psychological price to be paid in such a situation. A surprising thing for us, the filmmakers, was that after a few weeks of enforced confinement, we began to feel a certain anxiety at having to go outside. We realized that we had become conditioned to our situation, and our apartment prison had turned into our apartment haven. Claustrophilia extrapolates on this feeling to the extreme, and the results are horrifying.

Claustrophilia is influenced by the Asian psychological horror movies, including Ring, Grudge, Phone, Dark Water, Audition, and The Eye. For us, true horror lies not in shock cuts or blood and gore, but in the slowly realized understanding that there are frightening things that are beyond our control, and that we may be hurt despite our best efforts to protect ourselves.

The movie was filmed under a state of emergency due to the global Covid-19 pandemic crisis, confining people to their homes, which lends an air of authenticity to the story.