Director: Ti West
Screenplay: Ti West
Starring: Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, Kelly McGillis, Alison Bartlett, Jake Schlueter
Release Date: February 3, 2012
With THE INNKEEPERS writer/director Ti West once again showcases his innate ability to create eerily effective slow-burn tales of the macabre, establishing incredible atmosphere in the film’s first half before scaring the absolute shit out of me in the final act. It requires a great deal of patience from it’s audience, which might turn most off, but I feel that the payoff is ultimately worth the wait.
The film follows Claire (Paxton) and Luke (Healy), two staff members at the Yankee Pedlar Inn, during it’s final weekend of operations. Claire is an awkward yet loveable girl who seems to exist in a state of arrested development. She is unsure about the direction her life has taken her in, and takes up a childlike interest in the amateur paranormal investigations of Luke. Luke is your typical disheveled geek who might have stronger feelings for Claire than he’s willing to admit, but fortunately West sidesteps that issue and narrows his focus to their humorously quirky relationship as they spend one last weekend at their supposedly haunted workplace, occasionally dealing with their three guests, a rude woman and her child, and Leanne Reese-Jones (McGillis), an old has-been sitcom actress turned spiritualist. Claire and Luke have decided to spend the entire weekend at the hotel, taking shifts sleeping in one of the many empty rooms. While Luke sleeps, Claire decides to do some ghost hunting of her own, using Luke’s EVP recording equipment to try to scare up the spirit of Madeline O’Malley, the ghostly specter who supposedly haunts the hotel. At first Claire doesn’t find much of interest….until she hears someone playing the piano in the lobby, that is. And then the strange sound of footsteps coming from upstairs. Soon Claire will find out the hard way that perhaps she ought not disturb that which she cannot comprehend.
THE INNKEEPERS is a film that requires a great deal of patience, and much of your enjoyment of the film is entirely dependent on whether or not you like Claire. If you don’t, then odds are you will more than likely hate this movie, but I strongly identified with her childish and listless nature, as she contemplated the how’s and why’s of how she wound up operating the desk at a dying inn. Sara Paxton’s portrayal of Claire was my anchor for this film, and she kept me interested thoroughly for the first hour and twenty minutes when, honestly, not much really happened, at least action-wise. I think the formula Ti West has developed for his horror films is quite ingenious, in that he constructs films with very simple storylines, with limited casts and locations, and then proceeds to milk these elements for all they’re worth. I grew to really like Claire and Luke over the course of this flick, enjoying their relatively banal banter so much so that I was lulled into a false sense of security by the time the final act started. At a certain point Claire and Luke descend into the basement of the inn, in an attempt to make contact with the spirit of Madeline, and through the use of simple shadows and a few well placed sound effects, West and the cast managed to send a chill down my spine. I got so used to the quirky humor of the first two-thirds of the movie that when it came down to the end, when the shit really hit the fan, I was honestly taken aback.
Let me be clear. I do not scare easily. A lifetime of watching films of this type has numbed me for the most part. But there came a point in the final ten minutes of this movie where I curled up into a ball and could hardly look at the screen. I happened to be watching this with my mother, and I shit you not, she had to watch the climax of from her bedroom, she was so scared.
THE INNKEEPERS takes a long time getting to it’s ultimate goal, but when it finally does I believe it pays off spectacularly. A lot of people won’t like this film. I understand that, can even respect it. Ti West makes a particular brand of horror film, one that hasn’t really been in style since the 60’s, but whatever wavelength he’s operating on just happens to be the same as mine, because this, along with his previous HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, frightened me more than any other horror film I’ve seen since was a child. It’s rare for me to find one movie within a decade with that kind of power, let alone two. I am eagerly looking forward to whatever nightmares West has in store for us nest.
My Rating: 9/10
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