Not
quite as satisfying as Ti West’s earlier The House of the Devil (2009), (which
I found to be a badly needed breath of fresh air in a horror movie world piled
to the rafters with boring, depressing, unoriginal and uncinematic junk), his
follow-up The Innkeepers admirably continues West’s interest in prolonged
suspense versus series of empty jumps, though there are certainly some good
jumps here too. At some future point it
may strike me as equal in excellence to The House of the Devil, but
right now The Innkeepers suffers in the context of the myriad of movies
about ghosts and hauntings that are clogging the theaters, the best of which,
by far, was the first Paranormal Activity (2009). Two employees - Claire (Sara Paxon) and Luke
(Pat Healy) - of an old New England hotel run
things alone during its last weekend before closing up for good. They also happen to be big-time enthusiasts
of supernatural phenomena and hope to document something, anything, that the
hotel’s deceased tenants might want to show them. Claire and Luke are likeable, well-drawn
characters, the antithesis of the cannon-fodder we are usually presented in
horror films, and their transition from quasi-ironic smart-asses to terrified
believers is expertly handled by writer/director West in a remarkably short
span of time. In a period when the worst
all-purpose criticism of any movie is to say that it’s “slow,” I admire West
all the more for persisting in his deliberately-paced style and willingness to
let ambiguity and a general feeling of unease rule the day instead of
assembly-line plotting that lazy viewers expect to keep them titillated at clockwork
intervals. He lets his audience come to
him rather than chasing after it desperately as most horror directors do.
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