The Innkeepers (USA, 2011)
I love this drawing - I find it to be almost a perfect representation of the image, style, and feel of the film. Take a look at it (click to enlarge); doesn't it remind you of an 80's-style, PG-rated, possibly Amblin Entertainment-produced spook-fest? Me, too - and that's exactly why I think most people are not going to be very big fans of The Innkeepers.
The film opens on the Yankee Pedlar Inn, as it settles in for its going-out-of-business weekend. The two last employees tasked with keeping it open, Claire (Sara Paxton, who has an adorable, lanky Reese Witherspoon kind of thing going on) and Luke (Pat Healy, almost unrecognizable here as a lackadaisical employee, even though you and I have seen him in easily a dozen other things, I didn't know it was him until I looked it up for this post) manage to keep each other entertained while they go through the motions of staffing the hotel for the last couple of guests. There's the angry woman and her son, punishing her husband by disappearing for the weekend; the former TV star-turned-faith-healer, in town for a convention; and the old man who wants to spend one last night in the room that was his honeymoon suite before it gets torn down. Since there's a legend about a ghostly woman, Madeline O'Malley, who's said to haunt the hotel, Claire and Luke in their boredom decide to try and catch a recording of her spectral presence before the Inn closes for good. As they meander through the hallways at night, they begin to hear strange noises; the game, to quote another popular investigator, is afoot.
Here is the only thing that The Innkeepers shares narratively with its predecessor, House of the Devil: almost nothing happens. Claire and Luke crack jokes, try and entertain each other, drink some beers, and more or less bum around the final nights of their job, wondering what they're doing with their lives. Only instead of an 80-minute buildup to a crackling climactic explosion, here the denouement is almost mundane: Claire, after experiencing some piano keys tinkling on their own, and a rather frightening - albeit brief - dream of the dead woman, gets trapped in the basement, and as she tries to push and scream her way out, the ghost, previously seen only while asleep, appears as all-too-real. It moves, ever so gradually, towards Claire. Cut. Scene. Epilogue. Print.
And truly, Ti West would seem to like nothing better than to continue recording the lazy conversations of these two bored employees - and oddest of all, I think it would be eminently watchable if it was anything like the exchanges on display here. His two main concerns seem to be: capturing every contour of the lovely and talented Ms. Paxton's face; and offering a stern scolding to the cheap tropes of contemporary horror. In an early scene, Claire watches an internet video clip that Luke recorded, of a door in the Inn mysteriously (and slowly) closing shut, seemingly by itself. That same scene is repeated at the end of the film, in a slowly progressing close-up that mimics the previous shot, yet manages to ramp up everything about the tension and buildup of the frame that the grain-y, rote video version of the same utterly lacked. It's West calling bullshit on the current tactics of horror, but doing it through yet another, even older trope of the same.
That's the thing about The Innkeepers: I don't think most people have an affection for the kind of film West is paying homage to here. It really is the equivalent of one of those easy-going Disney PG mood pieces from the 80s, in which goofy kids explore a haunted house, only to have a ghost periodically show up and say "Boo!" - only, y'know, without any of the jump-cuts or button-pushing nonsense that categorizes ninety percent of the contemporary horror films. In other words, West is effectively alienating most of his audience: there's no real scares, no gore, no "cool" genre tropes he's paying tribute to, no narrative tension; he's basically made a horror film without any horror. I understand the criticisms I've read, as they all basically say one thing: that he's criticizing one type of stereotypical nonsense (the computer-generated jump-cut bullshit of recent years) yet essentially falling into another pile of nonsense (the worn-out tropes of second-rate B-movies for kids - "don't go in the basement!" - that have lost just as much potency as the contemporary signposts). And, in a certain sense, that is unquestionably true: West is showing scorn for one set of outdated tropes while fervently embracing another.
But therein lies all the difference. One man's cliche is another man's poetry - the devil is in the details. Seriously, read the script for Full Metal Jacket sometime: it's a mess of stereotypes and cliches. But Kubrick, through his unbelievable eye, elevates it into something more. A fitting analogy, since West invites so many comparisons to the late, great master. His eye for composition is, to put it ever so eloquently, un-fuckwithable. His framing and attention to depth is so rare and unexpected in a filmmaker working in his medium and budget level that one can be excused for missing the forest for the trees. But while the Kubrick comparisons in the past seemed all too logical, in this latest film they strike me as a bit misplaced, as West is gunning for someone else: Spielberg. Honestly, much like Spielberg, he is both overrated (the best in his class!) and underrated (everyone seems to forget that whatever his storytelling flaws, Spielberg is honestly a master of composition as well). And, like the Amblin movies of yesteryear this film strives to evoke, there's a lighthearted touch to everything about The Innkeepers. The movie is a bit out of time - it could take place anytime in the past 20 years (the existence of websites being the ONLY reference point that could date it). Ti West has crafted a film to delight a type of teenager who, in my opinion, no longer exists. It's a fool's errand, one that has garnered him a lot of backhanded compliments and sighs of boredom in horror circles, and God bless him for it. I would watch it again in a heartbeat.
(Next up: Monday brings us the first of the methodically - and potentially ridiculous - straight-up horror nuggets, as we watch the first of our reader-recommended films: The Shrine. See you then!)
