“You can’t save her.”
Ti West has an old-fashioned sensibility. His films are methodical and talky, with a distinctly retro vibe. He’s not alone in this; James Wan, for instance, made a solid tribute to Hammer films in Insidious. But West takes it a step further. He builds his worlds and his characters with such meticulousness that his exactitude starts to elicit, somehow, a sense of dread. He captures the minutiae of life, work, conversation, all in such detail that his films like The House of the Devil (which was on last year’s list, but due to technical problems I had to scrap the review) and The Innkeepers feel lived-in and authentic, like these characters have lives before and (sometimes) after the movie begins.
The Innkeepers is tight and economical, which gives West lots of room to explore the space he’s created. Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) are the only two employees left working at the soon to be shuttered Yankee Pedlar Inn. They live at the hotel and switch off twelve-hour shifts; since there are precious few guests staying at or checking in to the Yankee Pedlar, Claire and Luke are free to kill boredom by trying to prove that the long-running rumors of hauntings are true. Massive credit is due to production designer Jade Healy (A Ghost Story) – the Yankee Pedlar inspires dread with its narrow, Kubrickian hallways, yet feels somehow ordinary and dependable, which only serves West’s purposes. He wants us to think about the horror lurking beneath our day-to-day lives. He uses wide shots only sparingly, and whenever he does, he has the viewer scanning the corners, looking for even the faintest movement.
The Innkeepers has an ebb and flow to it, and here is where West’s style becomes potentially alienating. Some horror fans demand more out of their films, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but the more patient viewers will find themselves entranced by the hermetically sealed world of the hotel (the one time anyone leaves the hotel, it’s so jarring that West hangs a lantern on it by giving us a dramatic closeup of a foot stepping onto the concrete of the outside world). In the early stretches of the film, West plays with the audience through deliberate fake-outs. A long scene of Claire taking out a heavy garbage bag doesn’t turn scary, but is just a nice showcase for Paxton’s physical comedy chops. A banging noise from the cellar turns out to be a bird. Why are none of the rooms stocked with towels?
The Innkeepers engages with B-movie tropes in a pleasing fashion: it doesn’t satirize or subvert them, just treats them as a natural part of the story’s makeup. Claire and Luke use analog equipment to record paranormal phenomena, and when their search pays off, all of West’s careful plotting explodes in jagged bursts. The first thing we see is minor, in comparison to what will come later: just two keys on a piano being pressed by an invisible hand. But we’ve gotten to know Claire so well that her reaction transfers to the viewer. The Innkeepers is like a solid line with occasional spikes, and what’s admirable about West’s sure-footed direction is that he’s able to return to each level without sacrificing what makes them work.
Unlike most horror films, when The Innkeepers gets scary, it allows itself time to return to normal. There are only a few real scares in this film – but they’re damn good ones. In another great B-movie twist, one of the hotel’s few guests, a retired actress named Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis), is now a medium, and offers to help Claire get in touch with the spirits of the hotel. In the film’s best scene, they hold an impromptu seance on Leanne’s bed. McGillis is fantastic in this scene, offering a genuine supplication to the other side, an earnest attempt to communicate with something larger and older than ourselves. Even Leanne’s crystal pendulum is played straight, and belies a certain amount of earnestness on West’s part.
The Innkeepers sets aside time for weird little scenes like the seance. The hotel’s normal operations still continue, even in the face of horror, which adds to the incongruity. Potential plot threads, such as an angry young woman staying at the hotel with her son, are dangled, and never resolved. It adds to the realism of the piece, but it could frustrate some viewers who wonder why that character is in the film at all.
I don’t want to give the impression that the film isn’t scary. When West wants to show his hand, he does so with sadistic aplomb. The ghosts in this are not pleasant to look at: bloated, distended, bloodied. There is no reasoning with them, and what’s more, we don’t even know their motives. At one point, a strange old man insists on staying in a room that has been closed, because that’s where he spent his anniversaries with his late wife. Later, Claire finds him in the bathtub, dead from a suicide. His horrible visage tells us that he died in considerable pain, and later in the film he haunts Claire, meaning her harm. Why? Why do he and Madeline O’Malley (who hung herself on her wedding night) bear ill will towards Claire? West doesn’t explain, nor does he have to. The Innkeepers could frustrate viewers who want a more in-depth explanation, or who want a happy ending. West doesn’t care about either.
The Innkeepers reminds me of a saying about Miles Davis: listen to the notes he’s not playing. What Ti West chooses not to show us is just as important as what he puts on full display. This is certainly a polarizing film, especially to those who want a quicker pace in their horror (and again, there’s nothing wrong with that; the only “bad” horror fan is the kind who thinks that Eli Roth and Rob Zombie are talented filmmakers). But stick with this one. You’ll feel it along your spine.
10/1: Hellraiser
10/2: Splice
10/3: Jennifer’s Body
10/4: Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist
10/5: Kill List
10/6: Halloween II
10/7: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge
10/8: Ginger Snaps
10/9: Cube
10/10: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
10/11: Hell House LLC
10/12: Re-Animator
10/13: Beetlejuice
10/14: Idle Hands
10/15: The Ring
10/16: I Know What You Did Last Summer
10/17: Night of the Living Dead
10/18: The Devil’s Backbone
10/19: Event Horizon
10/20: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
10/21: Eyes Without a Face
10/22: The Strangers
10/23: In the Mouth of Madness
10/24: The Amityville Horror
10/25: Gerald’s Game
10/26: The Monster Squad
10/27: Veronica
10/28: High Tension
10/29: The Innkeepers
10/30: The People Under the Stairs
10/31: Saw
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