The Innkeepers is often a 2012 horror film created, directed, and edited by Ti Western, starring Kelly McGillis, Pat Healy and Sara Paxton.
A man and a new girl are working the last night at a rural Connecticut inn having a spooky past. They determine to discover if there really are generally any ghosts living with the hotel before the place shuts down forever.
Writer/Director Ti West, after only a handful of films, has developed a very distinctive style for himself which style is very a lot on display in his or her latest film, THE INNKEEPERS, a tense, haunted house style thriller.
Sara Paxton stars since Claire, a tomboyish girl inside her early 20s having little to no aspirations in life. Her co-worker (Wally Healy) is a little bit older with equally little with respect to ambition, other than to smash on Claire. These are our a pair of leads and, like HOUSE OF THE ACTUAL DEVIL before it, we are focused exclusively on them for nearly all the film.
Without any kind connected with chemistry between Paxton and Healy, the film would bumble but West wisely doesn’t try to immediately crank up the stress in the hotel and spends the first act instead building a rapport along with his two leads. Paxton is an alluring horror vixen, mainly because she doesn’t appear to be a scream queen. She wears no facial foundation, dresses in dowdy work clothes and possesses a boyish bob slice. But she’s cute and funny all alike and we understand why her co-worker has the hots for her along with uses his paranormal fascination to spook her into coming to him for protection.
West is a director of considerable weight with regards to tone and style and also hits the mark wonderfully on those notes over the film. It’s a quiet, lurking affair of impending dread and uses that to build suspense instead of affordable jump scares. West will often hold an attempt so long with nary a noise on the soundtrack almost daring you to look away.
But while West excels at those issues with filmmaking, he still seems to have trouible with the development of their scripts. I’m still not really sure what the meaning behind the ghost story was and when you read too much with it, you’ll notice how flimsy it happens to be. There’s a ghost with the hotel! But wait, that’s not really your ghost! Or wait… maybe it is? But who’s that?
It feels sometimes throughout the movie that West had a thought of what he planned to do and had to beef up many of the plot around that bare bones idea, filling it with mythological mumbo-jumbo and also a psuedo clairvoyant-cum-drunk played by simply Kelly McGillis. The movie would’ve been as effective (and probably moreso) if Western side had kept his unknown a mystery.
While the script is paper thin, THE INNKEEPERS is still a good little indie thriller that continues to prove Ti West is really a horror director worth enjoying. If he can discover a collaborator for his next script, I’d be very interested to discover where he can get.
