The Innkeepers

Much of this film is so good. The way that the characters hang out, the pacing, the title-cards, the color palette. And yet, it falls into a trap that so many films of 2012 have fallen into, that it's almost becoming a theme. I would relate the syndrome to Brian De Palma's worthless piece of crap: CARRIE. There's a film that, if the theater had lost electricity twenty minutes before the end of the movie, I would have walked home thinking it a masterpiece. The same was true of CHRONICLE. And now the same is true of THE INNKEEPERS. All of these films establish a wonderful sense of its individual values. In CARRIE, that's empathy. In CHRONICLE, it's anti-action. And in THE INNKEEPERS, it's sense of place. For the film slowly creates what it's like for the two characters: Claire (Sarah Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) as they work in the Yankee Pedlar Inn on its last weekend. The two hang out, flirt with each other and the idea of ghosts in the hotel, and a couple of weird last-minute guests. Director Ti West gives the hotel a very specific sense, and we watch how Claire reacts to Luke's inability to replace the rooms' towels, calling him to come down for his shifts, and surfing the internet at four in the morning. Then, however, the film loses its way because it did not trust what made the good parts of it so good. It falls into a clichéd universe of poorly executed fright scenes, and a truly dumb ending. THE INNKEEPERS has an ending that betrays the rest of it more than CHRONICLE, but in a similar way to CARRIE. Both films are horror films, so I'm not surprised. But still, THE INNKEEPERS is just so wonderfully meandering at the beginning that sharp shifts in mood and tone just ruin the film.

★★