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The Innkeepers (Ti West, 2011)
What most distinguishes
The Innkeepers, however, is not its parade of scares (indeed, it’s never all
that terrifying), but instead the expert way that it makes its slow accumulation
of dread feel almost pleasant. Set almost entirely in a gigantic Connecticut inn
that is in its last weekend of operation, the film follows two desk clerks and
would-be paranormal investigators (Sara Paxton and Pat Healy) as they
investigate the hotel’s haunted past. Although the hotel has very few guests,
The Innkeepers takes on the feel of a
“hangout” movie as it unfolds. The pointless routine of the characters’ work
life is conveyed with no small amount of good-natured comedy, and the likeable
performances of the small cast amplify the feeling that these are characters
that we’d like to get to know better. The tone, although peppered with
supernatural hijinks, is often closer to that in an easygoing comedy like
Empire Records than the ominous dread
of something like The Shining. West’s careful handling of
The Innkeepers ensures that its
overfamiliar plot becomes something of an asset. Haunted house films are such
well-trodden territory, that he is freed up to focus on the characterizations of
his slacker protagonists. That little of incident happens for a long stretch of
the film feels less like a delay from
the eventual climax than an examination of young lives in cheerful, if aimless,
stasis. One wishes that West had more emphatically drawn connections between his
young heroine’s sense of purposeless and the frustration that the inn’s ghosts
feel, but parallels unmistakably are there. The Innkeepers,
much like West’s The House of the Devil,
feels almost deliberately minor. The pleasures here are small, but sure to be
resonant for horror film fans. The effortless way that West advances his plot is
commendable, and the performances he gets from his cast (especially Paxton, who
seems like a find) are refreshingly natural. Because of its relaxed nature
The Innkeepers seems likely to become
a cult favorite in its own right, easily rewatchable and warmly recalled. 60 Jeremy Heilman 01.03.12
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If
he hasn’t quite proven himself to be the next great horror auteur that some have
predicted, director Ti West has nonetheless impressed with his output to date
with a series of deliberately paced, extremely atmospheric films.
The Innkeepers, his latest, continues
his trend of mining the genre’s rich past to create contemporary frights.
Superficially recalling bygone haunted house stories such as
The Changeling, the film builds
slowly toward a predictable, if satisfying, conclusion.