His leads get on well together and they trade jibes and personal confessions with equal skill. He's got a solid structure here, an operating knowledge of ghostly tropes, and a strong ear for dialogue. The Innkeepers is a tough movie to criticize, because, outside of its languid pace, there's really no determining factor for why it's not a more involving piece of cinema. The problem with The Innkeepers is that the film is constantly on the cusp of getting good, so the fact that it never even manages to illicit the shivers and shakes you signed on for is a real bummer. In some cases, like the Paranormal Activity franchise, the trick is that the movie leading up to that point is pretty bad, and so you're ready for some action. It's a technique that can work: lull your audience into an unsuspecting calm before walloping them with the frights. There's a lot of talk of ghosts and several false alarms before things start to go really wonky. The Innkeepers smolders on an extended slow burn. She is easily susceptible to suggestion, and since the hotel only has two occupancies, she has plenty of time to go looking for spooky stuff. Caught up in his stories of the woman who died waiting for her lover more than a century prior is Luke's co-worker, Claire (Sara Paxton, Shark Night 3D). He has been trying to document the Pedlar's supernatural activity for a website he is building. Luke (Pat Healy, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) is a smarmy ghost hunter with a Tintin haircut. Two clerks are working around the clock on the establishment's final weekend.
What we have here is a pretty basic haunted house story-though in this case a haunted hotel. It goes a long way for The Innkeepers, too, just not far enough. I never saw Devil, so I can't say how they compare, but from all I've heard, the sincerity of the effort was a big sell of that feature. Like 2009's The House of the Devil, last year's The Innkeepers is a low-budget, carefully planned indie horror movie. Writer/director Ti West isn't as misguided regarding his own talents as the guys in American Movie-in other words, he really has some-but he does appear to be as genuine in his desire to chronicle the cinematic tales of things that go bump in the night. We all saw American Movie, right? It was pretty clear that Coven was going to turn out pretty bad, but the way the guys in the documentary were so committed to trying to tell a good scary story, it was hard not to pull for them to at least get a shot at it. There is always something at least a little bit likable in a sincerely made horror movie.
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