THE INNKEEPERS
***
DIRECTED BY Ti West
STARS Sara Paxton, Pat Healy
Admittedly, I took my sweet time about it, but it was only a few weeks ago that I finally caught up with 2009's The House of the Devil. This wildly acclaimed effort from writer-director Ti West had been repeatedly referred to as a throwback to the horror films of the 1980s, a designation that doesn't strike me as entirely accurate. Rather, West's unsettling yarn about a college student (Jocelin Donahue) running afoul of a satanic cult seems to borrow from several decades, given its mishmash of '60s Hammer ambiance, '70s under-the-nails grit, '80s rollicking soundtrack (from Jeff Grace's John Carpenter-esque score to period songs by The Fixx, The Greg Kihn Band and Thomas Dolby), and modern-day mumblecore. It's an impressive piece, with West maintaining a firm grip on the material until a harried and hurried ending that's not entirely satisfying. But no matter: By turning his back on the torture-porn techniques prevalent in many contemporary tales, West was branded one of the saviors of the often maligned horror genre.
With The Innkeepers, he shows no intention of giving up his exalted status. As before, the reverential filmmaker not only bypasses the gore galore but also largely avoids those cheap gotcha scares that directors often employ when they're unable to generate genuine suspense (latest guilty party: The Woman in Black). Like The House of the Devil, this latest picture has atmosphere to spare, and West furthermore does just enough different to distinguish it from other chillers of the "haunted house" variety.
The setting is the Yankee Pedlar Inn, a New England hotel that's about to close permanently. Before that happens, its sole employees, Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy, co-star of 2007's Charlotte-set-and-filmed Great World of Sound), are determined to obtain proof that the venue is haunted by the ghost of Madeline O'Malley, a newlywed who decades earlier had killed herself at the inn after being abandoned by her spouse and whose body was then buried in the cellar by the hotel's owners. Claire and Luke end up spending more time yakking about the supernatural than providing for the hotel's few guests, which include a washed-up TV actress (Kelly McGillis) now working as a psychic and an elderly man (George Riddle) who insists on renting a specific room on one of the now-shuttered floors.
Riddle's character is flat-out unsettling, but in her own way, so is that of McGillis — a feeling amplified by West's astute casting of an actress who was briefly all the rage in the 1980s (Witness, Top Gun, The Accused) but who has since become something of an ethereal, unseen presence herself. Indeed, in one form or another, all of the major characters are ghosts haunting the premises, including the central slackers. Luke is a college dropout whose personality is strictly defined by his computer, that impersonal otherworld where he can build his own website (a look at famous haunts) and access porn to his heart's content. Claire, meanwhile, is a tomboyish type who has no dreams, aspirations or expectations. We routinely see people like Luke in movies (Clerks, to name one of a thousand), so Claire is the real catch here. Twentysomething pixies in cinema are usually bright, brainy and socially functional — think Ellen Page in Juno or Natalie Portman in Garden State — but Claire is so naive and so backward, it's impossible to gauge how she would survive in the world outside the hotel. Thanks to West's penning of this character and Paxton's terrific performance in the role, we not only become emotionally invested in her travails, we also feel protective of her. Ergo, on those occasions throughout the film when neither Luke nor the psychic are able to adequately take care of her, we realize that their failure also feels like our failure. The true horror in this picture, then, isn't the presence of any spirits as much as it's the inability of the flesh-and-blood characters to undergo any meaningful manifestations in the material world.
(The Innkeepers will be screened as part of the Back Alley Film Series at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 1, at Crownpoint Stadium 12, 9630 Monroe Road. General admission is $8. Full details at www.backalleyfilmseries.com.)