Starring Sara Paxton, Pat Healy. Written and directed by Ti West. 14A. 100 min. Opens Feb. 3 at TIFF Bell Lightbox.
It’s safe to say that the talented young director Ti West has a thing for stark stories about adorable young women passing time in scary spaces. In 2009’s The House of the Devil, it was a babysitter padding impatiently around her client’s remote abode, unaware that she was being prepped for a demonic ritual. In The Innkeepers, it’s an aimless wage slave (Sara Paxton) who senses something uncanny going on at the hotel where she works at the front desk.
Paxton’s buoyant performance is the film’s most outstanding feature: As Claire, she’s completely credible both as a bored young woman feeling trapped by her job and a spooked but determined ghost hunter intrigued by the possibility of a haunting. She has a good tetchy rapport with Pat Healy as her cynical co-worker, and she also pulls off some great physical comedy in a superfluous but totally wonderful scene where she wrestles an oversize trash bag into a dumpster: Skittering and straining on tiptoes, she’s like a silent movie clown.
There’s not a lot of plot in The Innkeepers, but West indulges his talent for atmosphere and his fondness for ’80s flick references. In addition to gently riffing off the slow-burn build of The Shining with every shot panning down a hotel hallway, he finds a plum role for Top Gun babe Kelly McGillis as a burned-out movie star with a tenuous connection to the spirit realm. It’s arguable that The Innkeepers doesn’t stick the landing, and that the raw, pounding terror that marked the best parts of The House of the Devil is in short supply. But at the same time, West is a valuable rarity, a genre filmmaker who has more invested in his characters than in pandering to his audience’s expectations. The Innkeepers is a bit wobbly, but its best passages are evidence that West stands tall at the forefront of American horror-movie making.
