A young man interrupts a woman about to jump from the 12th floor of a Singapore apartment block and then commits suicide himself. This first permutation leads to further ones, as the film switches off between three tragicomedies of the lower middle class. In the first, the woman who tried to kill herself endures the vicious harangues of her mother's ghost ( " You're completely useless; all you do is sleep and eat " ). In the second, the stuffy older brother of an 18-year-old girl is obsessed with her sexuality and tries to control her life. In the third, a middle-aged Singaporean watches with anguish as his young Chinese bride, scornful of his buck teeth and of his inability to fund her consumerist aspirations, becomes more and more independent.

Seeking a mixture of irony, pity, and despair, Eric Khoo’s film achieves this magic blend only at moments. The diatribes of the film’s three impossible couples — all too clearly meant to portray a massive social crisis — hold the foreground for too long. It’s in its peripheral or silent scenes of dispersed faces and objects that 12 Storeys transcends its sociological interest to take on a calm, spectral half-life of its own.