Geekscape Movie Reviews: The Innkeepers
A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of being invited to view Ti West’s (The House of the Devil, Trigger Man, Cabin Fever 2) latest horror film, The Innkeepers.
This Magnet release was an official selection of 2011’s Fantastic Fest, SXSW 2011 and also showed at the Los Angeles Film Festival this past year. Fortunately for you, dear reader, this movie isn’t limited to the festival circuit and will be coming to select theaters on February 3rd. And if you don’t have it in a theater near you, you can always watch it On Demand. Hooray!
“The Innkeepers” features the talents of Sara Paxton as the aimless Claire (You may know her from Last House on the Left, but since I have a *thing* for, well, chick movies, I know and love her from Sydney White. Please stop judging me.) and Pat Healy as the equally aimless but further-along-in-his-acceptance-of-said-aimlessness, Luke (Who you’d recognize from Rescue Dawn, Ghost World, and, since you’re nerds, a bit part from Star Trek: Enterprise). We also have Ms. Kelly McGillis dropping in as traveling psychic/spiritual healer, Leann Rease-Jones, and you’d probably not recognize her as Charlie from Top Gun, but she certainly was.
And, yes, she took my breath away. (Why, oh why, did I just write that? It’s a lack of shame, that’s what it is. That and having no friends.)
“Goooooose! Nooooo!”
The plot follows thusly: The Yankee Pedlar Inn, a historic hotel in some unidentified town (actually: Torrington, CT) is about to shut down. The two remaining employees, Claire (Paxton) and Luke (Healy) have temporarily moved into the hotel for its last few days in order to split their shifts straight down the middle: twelve on, twelve off.
And to hunt ghosts. You see, The Yankee Pedlar Inn is rumored to be haunted by the ghost of Madeline O’Malley, a bride who was jilted at the atlar and hung herself in the hotel. According to legend, when her body was found, the staff hid it in the basement of the hotel for three days, making the basement a site of heavy hauntings.
In pursuit of this legend (among other things), Luke has created a website that talks about the history of The Pedlar and records its haunted occurances. This website, if you’re anything like me, will make you almost spill your drink once you cast your gaze upon its 1990s Geocities visage. Harkening back to it, thou mayest findth yourth abilitith to typeth regressivelyth altered..th.
Claire is interested in the project, but after a few nighttime explorations, she finds herself drawn rapidly in, more so than Luke himself. Once Claire’s idol, famous television actress Lea Rease-Jones, unexpectedly checks into the hotel and questions Claire’s goals in life, Claire violently latches onto her ghost hunting as a means of social salvation and life-purpose.
Which sounds really odd to write, but there it is. Ghosts = success.
Jealous of his glasses? Yes. Yes, I am.
Honestly, it makes perfect sense with Claire’s character. Paxton portrays an adorably awkward, completely desexualized girl who is wandering through her life. As Paxton charmingly put it during the movie’s press conference, “I think it all ties into the fact that Claire– we’ve all felt like this, she’s so relatable– she’s stuck at this dead-end job at the front desk. She’s really “murr” about life and she’s like, ‘Should I go back to school? I don’t know. The coffee girl is annoying. The movie star lady made me feel like a jerk.’ I think that because she’s so “murr” about the whole thing that when the ghost stuff starts getting crazy, she’s totally into it. She’s like, ‘This is the thing, I’m gonna do this now, because everything else is so lame.'”
The “murrness” (Which is incredibly, incredibly adorable when Paxton says it. If you are not, in fact, as adorable as Paxton, please hunt down the most adorable person in the vicinity and ask them to “murr” at you for something reaching the full effect.) of not just Claire’s situation, but Luke’s, is something that stretches through the entire film. It’s a sense of a sort of stuck wandering, like being trapped in a transition period– in a way similiar to the seeming awkward purgatory of puberty. And we’re going to pretend that I didn’t just make that metaphor.
During the same press conference, Ti West likened this to the theoretical situation of ghosts, where they are tied to a place, repeating the same actions over and over again, going nowhere. What really underscores this in the movie is the inn itself. Older inns were stops on long journeys, transition points from one place to the next. Occasionally, yes, inns would take on boarders, but those were still temporary inhabitants, waiting for the next stop in their lives.
Luke and Claire, however, are still trapped on this train car that (nearly… bwah hah ha..!) everyone jumped off of a long, long time ago and they still aren’t ready to leave.
Slightly philosophical discussions aside, I greatly enjoyed this movie. It was a classic ghost story– not in the epic way of “The Haunting”, but more along the lines of a story told around the campfire with a flashlight under your chin and a host of eight-year-olds that are likely to topple over at any moment.
“Bloody finger, bloody finger!”
That being said, it is one of those slow burns. The pressure builds over the course of the movie– there’s not a lot of gore and the real jump-inducers are pretty much all at the tail-end. It’s fun and the dialogue is smart and, if you’re a “Real Genius” nut like me, you’ll catch a lovely reference to it in the bowels of this movie that’ll give you a good laugh.
Give the preview a gander and show this great little movie some love.
