***½/**** | Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, Kelly McGillis, George Riddle
written and directed by Ti West
by Walter Chaw The Innkeepers, Ti West's awesome follow-up to his exceptional The House of the Devil, finds adorable, inhaler-adorned, pocket-Reese Witherspoon Claire (Sara Paxton) and her Jeffrey Combs-manqué co-worker Luke (Pat Healey) the titular entry-level hospitality-management types at the mostly-unoccupied, and haunted, Yankee Pedlar Inn. Over the course of their last weekend there and in the pursuit of memorializing local folklore, Claire and Luke set up a webpage touting the inn's supernatural qualities and go about capturing footage with which to occupy bandwidth. Little do they know that there might actually be something clanking about in the attic (or the cellar, as the case may be), and as the Inn gathers a couple of guests--'80s TV mom Leanne (Kelly McGillis) and an old guy (George Riddle) with a very particular room request--things come, as they say, to a head.
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The fascination of the film is in trying to puzzle out whether our Innkeepers are just making shit up to amuse each other in manufacturing the story of a woman who's hung herself in the Pedlar over a lost love, or if it matters either way. As with The House of the Devil, West is presenting the case that perception can be reality--that the reason we feel a prickle of unease when we look down a long, dark corridor might point to something in the hardwire, and that haunting and ghosts are conversations about what we ultimately believe and the extent to which what we believe affects our physical selves. The beauty of The Innkeepers is that it offers a conversation about identity and philosophy without requiring that you engage in it. It's conventionally entertaining, in other words, as well as existentially provocative--and the more effective a catalyst for discussion because of it.
Although set in the present day, The Innkeepers is best read as throwback to eighties flicks like An American Werewolf in London and The Evil Dead, which offered comedic counterpoint to the decade's darker offerings (to which West's The House of the Devil paid homage) while still delivering the goods, in spades, by the end. It's arguably tougher to manage a balance between light working comedy and genuinely effective ghost story (see: Steve Miner's House) than to serve up a straight devil-worship flick. What West demonstrates this time out is a real facility with his actors. He casts McGillis in the same way he cast Dee Wallace Stone in The House of the Devil, as not only a reminder of his roots (and his indebtedness to them), but also a means through which he might resurrect the idea of character actors in ensemble pieces who provide a richness to the text simply by the fact of them. It's what Tarantino does--which is, you'll agree, high praise. Healy and Paxton are natural and easy to like, enough so that when they're placed in peril, what begins as something of a lark succeeds in generating what feels like real stakes. Paxton's early fear-reactions to the picture's jump-scares effectively comment on the nature of jump-scares themselves. By encouraging a laugh-response, they defuse our fatigue with the tactic. They remind of why it used to be so much fun to scare that girl you liked in homeroom. By the time the film gets serious, an aggregate dread has built without our having had much chance to become inured to it--it's generated access, it's defeated all guards.
The real magic of The Innkeepers, though, is that its central characters are the actual ghosts of the piece: twenty-somethings trapped in a nothing job at a nowhere inn, punching a clock, remembering other peoples' childhoods lived through syndicated sitcoms as their own, and ruing the day they dropped out of college. The inability to form the sort of true, sublime connections we claim as our birthright is the engine that runs the sadness of the picture's conclusion. An old guy checks in to memorialize his long-dead honeymoon, and it's that type of love and devotion that Claire and Luke (and the world's most irritating barista) desire, that Luke substitutes with Internet porn and Claire seeks when she tries to express her affection for a bitter old actress' mostly-forgotten television show. It's not an accident that Luke finally declares his feelings for Claire right before the shit goes down for real. The Inkeepers' ghosts are manifestations of the heroes' loneliness and detachment. It's funny, and it's terribly sad, and it owes its stickiness to that thing West understands about horror: that nothing feels colder than the loss of innocence to tedium, routine, and the unbearable mendacity of being.
THE BLU-RAY DISC
by Bill Chambers Dark Sky shepherds The Innkeepers to Blu-ray in an organic 2.40:1, 1080p transfer. The film was shot in Super35 and retains its cinematic qualities in the HiDef realm--chiefly grain, the crisp coat of which coalesces into electronic noise with blessed infrequency. Blacks are deep, rich, and often all-consuming, but the image proves capable of rendering the most crepuscular activity. Detail is pleasingly glassy throughout and the carefully coordinated colours look photochemical, for lack of a better word. The disc opens with a notice that its 5.1 DTS-HD MA soundtrack should be played loud and I obliged, delighting in every jolt but more importantly feeling the dread almost subaurally built into the mix in the pit of my stomach and the base of my brain. Voices are occasionally a bit sharp yet never shrill, and the lossless encode rewards the care that was put into recreating the tonal properties of audio recorded with a shotgun mike as it sounds through a pair of headphones.
Extras begin with a short but redolent behind-the-scenes featurette (7 mins., HD) in which cast and crew--guests of the same hotel they're shooting in--bond over their dogs (we infer that the Yankee Pedlar does not have no-pets policy) and the material, of course. Gracing the feature are two charming commentaries, the first with writer-director Ti West, producer Peter Phok, and second-unit director/sound designer Graham Reznick (they're eventually joined by Glass Eye Pix guru Larry Fessenden), the second with actors Sara Paxton and Pat Healy joining the returning West. Both tracks perpetuate and consolidate the production lore that circulated at the time of The Innkeepers' release--West's history with the Yankee Pedlar, the Kelly McGillis Skype call, the revelation of Paxton's dorkiness, etc.--but the discussion in each case dilates to include a gamut of topics, from unconscious influences (no stranger to ghosts, Healy found his performance haunted by too many viewings of Fargoand Pee-Wee's Big Adventure) to Fessenden's cameo (maddeningly offscreen).
It's a real geek draw to hear Reznick talk about layering silence on top of silence, or slowing down a song to create a droning effect, and Paxton confirms her adorability when she's so inclined to speak. (She shrieks, for real and again, at the cheap scare in the opening scene.) Akin to watching The Innkeeperswith the lights on, these yakkers succeed in demystifying the movie without desensitizing the viewer to it, no mean feat; there's real movie love here, though I get the impression they'd all be happy to never see the inside of the Yankee Pedlar again. The Innkeepers' theatrical trailer (HD) rounds out the platter, while trailers for Cold Sweat, Stakeland, and Wakewood cue up on startup.
Yeah, I do suppose the irony of my criticizing someone for his pretentious IMDb photos while I'm not wearing many clothes in my own Facebook photo was a little lost on me in my mad rant.
I was mad, okay?
But seriously, which Avatar took my shirt off? I really like the man-boy one, but the chick will also do. Blue cats are hot!
Posted by: Dan | December 14, 2012 at 03:49 AM
Whoa, Dan's so mad about this review his avatar took his shirt off!
Posted by: Lloyd Christmas | November 1, 2012 at 12:55 AM
This movie was easily the most boring, pretentious piece of shit I've seen in about 10 years. I do not understand this equally pretentious review. Walter - have you lost your mind? You're so much better than this. The movie does not deserve your mining for fool's gold.
The annoying chick and the dumb guy were wafer-thin "characters", not to mention haggard-looking Kelly Preston as the new-age con-artist "in touch with the energy of the universe" or whatever. "House" is an equally noxious 80s horror movie, so I suppose the comparison is apt, though at least that one had a few retarded laughs.
My friends have met Ti West and they assure me he's as big of an egotistical dick as his IMDB photos would have you believe. This ill-deserved praise - flying in the face of giving "Watchmen" and "Cloud Atlas" 2 stars - is utterly, stupefyingly outrageous.
Come the fuck on.
Posted by: Dan | October 29, 2012 at 10:03 PM