The Innkeepers

I’ve only seen two movies directed by Ti West, but it’s clear the man has a style, and a big component of that is a SLOOOOOOOOOW burn. X reveled in how deliberate the pacing was, which allowed you to get to know the cast and see the relationships, before turning on the slasher elements in the third act. The Innkeepers attempts to do that with the haunted house genre, and while the movie is good, there are some structural problems. Certainly, The Innkeepers is identifiable as a Ti West movie visually speaking. The man’s cinematography, and use of space and lighting is in a class by itself. He can up the tension and dread and unease by how he moves the camera or stages the lighting or the angle from which he shoots. The camera is not just our eyes into the world of the movie, they are almost a character unto itself, an unseen narrator. The movie is 98% a bottle movie, taking place almost entirely within a supposedly haunted hotel, and West uses the layout of the hotel fantastic visual effect. He is a magnificent visual storyteller. The script is unbalanced, though. The positives are well drawn characters that are fun to be with and hear. The tension is built smartly without resorting to standard haunted house movie tropes, and even in the climax, you don’t get the normal hurricane of banging cupboard doors and spooky laughter and sudden gusts of wind. The haunting here is subdued, a gnawing terror instead of the overt, almost campy theatrics of something like The Changeling. But the script is also bogged down by a lot of little moments that don’t go anywhere. The subplot with the wife leaving her husband is pointless. The scene at the coffee shop could be excised without missing a beat. Why have the two leads get drunk and the guy more or less admit to feelings for the female lead? I can’t tell if it feels like padding (at 105 minutes, it definitely doesn’t need padding) or West (who also wrote this) went overboard injecting personality and relationships, but it makes the slow build too slow. And haunted house stories also need breadcrumbs, moments that chisel away at the sanity of the lead. This has too few by far: a piano that plays a couple notes by itself and one possible spirit sighting in over an hour before the third act finally kicks in with a trip to the basement. And the finale is rushed, hitting that final gear but then hitting the epilogue about about 5-8 minutes too soon. It’s still a good movie, and it shows a filmmaker developing his voice and his craft. Maybe a little too deliberate and the awkward ending bring it down from great to very good. But very good is still a worthwhile watch in my book.