There are certainly things that go bump in the night in Ti West's The Innkeepers, the young filmmaker's fourth feature following the nerve-singeing House of the Devil. Floors are creaking, doors are slamming, and pianos are playing inexplicably at the Yankee Pedlar Inn, a small-town inn getting ready to close its doors for good. For the inn's two lone remaining on-site employees, Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy), these spooky instances prove essential to distracting themselves from not only their impending unemployment but also the wasted days that have led them to the Yankee Pedlar.
Indeed, supernatural dread goes hand-in-hand with existential malaise in The Innkeepers, and they become interchangeable as the film breaks into its admirably bleak climactic caterwaul. And where House of the Devil was a work dependent on its vice-grip atmosphere -- the sense that the endless hallways and vacant rooms of the titular Victorian were consumed at once by a petrifying emptiness and a slowly awakening evil -- West's latest ambitiously nurtures a wider scope of characters, including Lena Dunham's chatty barista and, most prominently, Kelly McGillis's washed-up television starlet turned dime-store clairvoyant.
This slightly broadened scope often disturbs the tension, and I'd be lying if I said The Innkeepers had me perched at the end of my seat the way House of the Devil did, but this is entirely on point with the personal weight of the story. Last year, West appeared in Joe Swanberg's Silver Bullets, one of the stronger entries in the prolific Swanberg's oeuvre, playing a low-budget horror director; a version of himself, essentially. The Innkeepers is an extension of this sort of inward exploration, though in a far more imaginative, if inarguably less direct fashion. Paxton's aimless believer and Healy's cynical nerd are opposing visions of West as he finds himself at an artistic impasse: To continue making spooky and supernatural movies or move on to other projects that challenge him in new ways.Much like Azazel Jacobs's sublime Terri and Aaron Katz's Cold Weather, The Innkeepers is a work of tremendous personal heft covertly masquerading as a genre film -- in this case, a haunted-house movie. More than horrific phantoms creeping and swirling about in the Yankee Pedlar, the ghost bride and her aged, bloodied ghoul of a groom are startling manifestations of Claire and Luke's innermost insecurities, in this case regarding both the perceived sexual and emotional bond between the co-workers and the deep fears they have of commitment and growing up. Dunham's nagging tirade about her deadbeat boyfriend and the occasional appearance of a separated woman and her child, not to mention McGillis's lonely spinsterhood and infomercial spirituality, provide supplemental variations on an uncertain future that compounds Claire's terror tenfold.
The fluid, untethered emotional range, forever spiking and settling before rupturing again, makes the The Innkeepers a lot more than the usual loud, crude machine of shock. West brings an uncommon patience and a prodigious sense of space and movement. The slight curls at the tips of Paxton's blonde bob become a mesmerizing focal point as she walks down a haunted hallway; the lack of anything but the momentary bleeps of a recording device as West's camera floats through a linen room sends chills dashing up and in between the vertebrae of your spine.
West, more than even Bryan Bertino (The Strangers), understands the unsettling power of silence, making the banshee-like howl of visceral terror that caps the film all the more effective, leading into a resonant coda. The genre mechanics are disrupted and yet the scares are plentiful, but whether they are the old-fashioned frights we remember from the original The Haunting or Jack Clayton's classic The Innocents, or the effects of a creeping fear of unfulfilled potential and responsibility remains ambiguous. What are ghosts, after all, but the figures of memories and thoughts that refuse to lie dormant in the subconscious and rise to augment the complacency of the present?
