Thursday, February 2, 2012
Film Checkout's a Bitch in Horror Thriller The Innkeepers
Posted by Jim Ridley on Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 11:33 AM
If you watch the careers of rising horror auteurs, you probably already know Ti West, who's earned a growing cult following on the basis of films such as The Roost and Trigger Man. The Belcourt took advantage of a last-minute opening to book West's latest shocker, the haunted-hotel thriller The Innkeepers, starring Pat Healy (who made an impression as a music-biz scammer in the indie drama Great World of Sound). It's getting good reviews, including this one from the Scene's Jason Shawhan:
Writer-director West's last film, 2009's The House of the Devil, was a modern horror classic of slow-burn tension and relentless unease, blessed with a great supporting turn from Greta Gerwig and one of the best scares of that year. The Innkeepers is the work of a more mature and accomplished filmmaker — one who remains a master of atmosphere and the intricacies of friendship. It doesn't quite have that great big mother of a scare, but it ratchets up tension to build to something altogether more unsettling.Working in Cinemascope for the first time, West is like a malevolent child with a brand-new playset. These hallways don't have Kubrickian awe, but the fact that he's shooting in an actual hotel — one that raised quite a few supernatural questions during the making of House of the Devil — renders these lived-in spaces all the more plausible as places of menace.
The Innkeepers opens Friday for a week's late-show run.
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