The Innkeepers

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

Lisa Schwarzbaum Feb 02, 2012

As a ghost story, The Innkeepers is pretty tame. As a horror movie, it’s relatively low-gore — and low-budget. But those constraints become assets in writer-director Ti West’s warm and witty deconstructed spook tale. West, a thirtysomething horror aficionado who previously toyed with the fate of an unlucky babysitter in his highly satisfying 2009 thriller The House of the Devil, now fiddles with the spectral malaise that infects a hundred-year-old inn. Wide-eyed Sara Paxton and hipster-bespectacled Pat Healy play the joint’s only two employees, working each other into a lather of what turns out to be well-founded hysteria. Kelly McGillis is a surprise treat as a grouchy medium.

The movie’s payoff is not exactly a stunner, and the narrative tension is relatively loose, even with the first appearance of the ghost of honor. (With its clever riff on 1980s moviemaking and wardrobe trends, The House of the Devil has more oomph.) But there are bright visual jokes scattered throughout, and smart little shout-outs to the familiar language of genre. Best of all, the filmmaker takes his unlucky couple of innkeepers seriously: He gives them living, breathing personalities, independent of their relationship with the house ghoul. B+

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CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Michael Phillips Feb 02, 2012

Lean and scary, “The Innkeepers” was shot in 17 days in a quaint Connecticut hotel called the Yankee Pedlar, where writer-director Ti West stayed while making his previous movie, “The House of the Devil.”

West works quickly and cheaply, and his latest, like “Devil,”flies in the face of almost every other kind of fright out there at the moment. It’s retro without a trace of self-consciousness. When did you last see opening credits including a phrase as homey and comforting as: ” … and Kelly McGillis as Leanne Rease-Jones”?

Leads first. On the eve of their inn’s closing, employees and pals Claire and Luke, played by Sara Paxton and Pat Healy, set out to confirm the existence of paranormal activity within the creaky old walls. “We’re gonna get something good,” Claire says, as they haul out the video camera and microphone for old ghosts’ sake, one last time. “I can feel it.” There’s nothing else going on in their isolated, recession-thwarted lives; they need the spirits to lift their own.

Few guests darken the inn’s doors: There’s a mother and a son escaping a rough domestic situation, and a onetime actress turned psychic, played by McGillis. There’s also an ancient gent who desires a night in Room 353, the honeymoon suite. He has been there before.

How this plays out, and how a long-ago suicide informs the slim story, allows West to honor the ghost stories he admires most — straightforward, effective examples of the genre, mostly from the ’60s, ’70s and early ’80s — while developing his suspense skills. Each visit to the root cellar is an exercise in nerve-tightening; the first time we hear the overloud telephone at the front desk, it’s both alarming and funny.

Healy’s timing sometimes goes slack, but he and Paxton click nicely as the underpaid but nervy ghost-busters.

Will “The Innkeepers” be enough for the young folk? These days there’s little middle ground between the determined lack of gore in the”Paranormal Activity”franchise and the determined overabundance offered by so much else. West works in that No Man’s Land, intelligently. His similarly nostalgic and carefully paced “House of the Devil” barely cracked $100,000 at the domestic box office. Here’s hoping his latest entices the niche horror audience it deserves.

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VARIETY

Joe Leydon March 16, 2011

After paying respectful homage to ’80s horror-thrillers with “The House of the Devil,” genre maven Ti West goes further back in time for “The Innkeepers,” a deliberately paced, dialogue-heavy ghost story in the style of Eisenhower-era B-pics. Indeed, West’s latest retro-referential effort wouldn’t be out of place on a ’50s drive-in double bill with the likes of “The Screaming Skull” or “Terror in the Haunted House.” Slow-burning buildup, lack of explicit mayhem and overall low-tech approach may strike cineastes as amusingly quaint, but mainstream auds aren’t likely to check in during limited theatrical runs. Homevid and VOD await.

The drama unfolds in the soon-to-be shuttered Yankee Pedlar Inn, located in downtown Torrington, Conn. During the hotel’s final days of operation, the staff has been reduced to two twentysomething employees — tomboyishly cute Claire (Sara Paxton) and aggressively nerdy Luke (Pat Healy) — who share an avid interest in the paranormal.

It’s obvious that, even if the hotel still were a thriving concern, these two probably wouldn’t tax themselves while attending to guests. But now that almost all the rooms are vacant, Claire and Luke can devote even more of their time to patrolling the hallways, inspecting the basement and scouring the lobby for signs of spirits long rumored to be haunting the inn.

Luke has already started a website devoted to the hotel’s history of supernatural manifestations, though he’s such a slacker that he hasn’t quite finished the site. Claire is a bit more consistently self-directed when it comes to ghost hunting, but she’s not entirely pleased when she finds what she’s looking for.

West and lenser Eliot Rockett deserve considerable credit for being able to generate suspense and occasionally spring scares without relying on familiar haunted-house atmospherics. The Yankee Pedlar Inn is a real place (West and his film company stayed there while shooting “House of the Devil” in nearby Lime Rock, Conn.), and throughout “The Innkeepers,” it appears no more foreboding than any other unremarkable inner-city hotel that hasn’t been refurbished since the 1970s.

For about an hour or so, West maintains interest by alternating between the animated conversations of Claire and Luke, and anxious explorations by an increasingly nervous Claire. Occasionally, West drops in a scene with Kelly McGillis as an aging actress-turned-spiritualist who just happens to be one of the hotel’s very last guests. For the most part, however, West’s intent is to unsettle, not shock or scare — until, at long last, the audience gets a good look at what’s going bump in the night.

Paxton is enormously appealing, Healy aptly prickly and McGillis effectively ambiguous. And as an added attraction, indie filmmaker Lena Dunham (“Tiny Furniture”) has a fleeting and funny cameo as an annoying barista in a neighboring coffee shop.

There’s nothing at all campy or in-jokey about “The Innkeeper”; one might say West is deadly seriously throughout. But composer Jeff Grace’s shrewdly moody music — which greatly enhances the sense of mounting dread in the pic’s second half — has strong hints of Bernard Herrmann’s classic scores for Alfred Hitchcock, suggesting that, like many other makers of thrillers, West sees nothing wrong with an occasional allusion to the Master of Suspense.

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ROGEREBERT.COM

Roger Ebert Feb 01, 2012

Truffaut once said it’s not possible to enjoy a film shot in the house where you were raised, because you’re always thinking about how they replaced the wallpaper. I had a little of that feeling during the ghost movie “The Innkeepers,” which reminded me of the much-loved Boulderado in Boulder, Colo. The movie is shot almost entirely within the (real) Yankee Pedlar Inn in Torrington, Conn. Both hotels are said to be haunted. I know someone who knew nothing about the Boulderado and saw a ghost standing in the closet of Room 506 — and when we told the desk clerk, she said the ghost my friend saw matched the descriptions of earlier guests.

Cue the “Twilight Zone” theme music. “The Innkeepers,” written, directed and edited by Ti West, is set on the last weekend of the hotel, which is scheduled to close. The third floor is already shut down, and only four rooms are in use in the second floor, two of them occupied by 20-ish Claire (Sara Paxton) and 30-ish Luke (Pat Healy). They’re sorta friendly part-timers who’ve brought along a video camera and are determined to find evidence of haunting. It could go on Luke’s Yankee Pedlar website, which he hopes to do some more work on one of these days.

One of the last guests is Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis), an actress who has left her TV work to specialize in the supernatural. She’s odd, standoffish, a little hostile, until she takes pity on the kids and shares what she knows about the hotel, which is pretty much everything.

Ti West knows how to build suspense with quiet and timing. I admired his “The House of the Devil” (2009), a POV story about a college student hired as a companion for an old lady whose son (the spectral Tom Noonan) and his wife live way down at the end of a long, long road in the middle of a dark, dark forest. The architecture in both of these West films is like a character; the part-time innkeepers patrol long and lonely corridors, poke around in the basement and stage-manage scenarios designed to coax any resident spirits to show themselves on video.

If this enterprise were treated in a high-voltage way, this would be another low-rent horror film. West is more patient. He evokes the feeling of a long night in a boring job, during which Claire and Luke speculate about ghosts as a way of amusing themselves. Their relationship, based on humor and enigmatic affection, would be entertaining enough that if no ghosts ever turned up, we would understand. “The Innkeepers” astonishingly creates characters who are not only specter-prey.

Supporting characters drift through. A mother angry with her husband brings along an obnoxious little boy. There’s a waitress from a nearby coffee shop (Lena Dunham, director-star of “Tiny Furniture“). Then … someone … else turns up. Ghost movies like this, depending on imagination and craft, are much more entertaining than movies that scare you by throwing a cat at the camera.

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NPR

Jeannette Catsoulis Feb 02, 2012

The greatest shock in The Innkeepers is that this old-school ghost story offers neither originality nor scares — because the young director Ti West knows full well how to do both.

In his 2009 breakthrough, The House of the Devil, he dropped a young babysitter into hell and his audience into a surprisingly effective take on cults and creeps. A couple of years earlier, inTrigger Man, he took us on a spine-tingling hunting trip in the Delaware woods alongside three unlucky New Yorkers who discover that deer may not be the only prey.

This latest, lovingly executed experiment in genre minimalism is altogether more conventional, though not necessarily the poorer for it. Set in New England’s Yankee Pedlar Inn (where West’s cast and crew stayed in 2008 while filming House of the Devil and where, according to the press notes, nightmares were had by all), the film opens with gentle comedy and ends in expected tragedy.

Events between unfold with the director’s signature slow burn and unshakable patience, a style that will please his fans but is unlikely to hold the attention of audiences unaccustomed to splatter-free fake-outs and an emphasis on dialogue over special effects.

Yet West’s throwback style and disdain for excess allows his characters to shine. The inn is closing down, and two professionally aimless desk clerks-cum-amateur ghost hunters are overseeing its final weekend. With only three guests to care for — a whiny mother and son, and a former actress turned grumpy medium (Kelly McGillis) — 20-somethings Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) are swapping 12-hour shifts and bump-in-the-night taping duties on a portable recorder.

Their specific target is the century-old spirit of a suicidal bride whose body allegedly molders beneath the hotel floorboards. Now she sobs and slams doors in fine haunted-house tradition, while eluding all attempts to capture her carryings-on.

But the pleasures of The Innkeepers have little to do with the film’s hoary, don’t-go-near-the-basement plot or the ghoulish goings-on in the honeymoon suite. Jeff Grace’s spooky score, strongly influenced by Bernard Herrmann’s work for Alfred Hitchcock, swirls around the hotel’s empty rooms and swells beneath each gurgled moan and whisper. Meanwhile, cinematographer Eliot Rockett’s camera tracks through the hallways like a dog sniffing at Claire’s heels, leaping backward when she’s startled and bounding across thresholds she doesn’t dare cross.

And as eerie experiences multiply — a self-playing piano, a scrabbling in the walls — the palette may darken, but the director’s painstaking stealth and unhurried attention to detail remain constant.

That attention adds a richness to his characters that horror movies rarely provide. As bright, Bambi-eyed Claire and slacker Luke — a little older and a lot more disappointed with life — banter affectionately, the warmth between them counters the story’s chills. Even a brief scene in a local coffee shop, featuring Tiny Furniture‘s Lena Dunham as an over-confiding barista, is no throwaway but an integral piece of the film’s texture.

In fact, so entertaining are the characters that you may leave the theater before realizing that the film’s specters might emanate from somewhere much closer — much, much closer — than the haunted history of a Connecticut hotel.

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NEW YORK POST

Sara Stewart Feb 03, 2012

With the right accompaniment, a slow trudge down the hallway of any aging hotel can become the stuff of nightmares. That’s the simple, effective premise, with obvious nods to “The Shining,” in this ghost story from horror director Ti West (“The House of the Devil”).

It’s closing weekend at the rundown Yankee Pedlar, where bored employees Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) aim to record some audiovisual evidence for Luke’s Web site about the inn’s haunted history: Long ago, a jilted bride hung herself, and the mortified owners stashed her body in the woodshed.

Looking like a bit of a ghost herself, gray-haired Kelly McGillis shows up as a — what else? — washed-up actress turned mystic. Her warnings to avoid the basement fall on deaf ears, as the plucky Paxton aims to “find out what that ghost’s f – – kin’ problem is.”

Are there gaping plot holes? Indeed. Are there stretches where nothing happens? Yes, but they sure do ratchet up the jumpiness. “The Innkeepers” is no masterpiece, but you may well leave with your nerves expertly jangled.

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A.V. CLUB

Alison Willmore Feb 02, 2012

The unhurried gait of The House Of The Devil and the new film The Innkeepers have led to director Ti West being hailed as the king of slow-burn indie scariness. (Or to the impatient, as an infuriating filmmaker.) But The Innkeepers suggests that West’s greatest strengths may lie with the way he handles the meeting between normalcy and terror, and how characters cling to the former longer than is advisable, because people would—they don’t think they’re in a horror movie. Sara Paxton, as The Innkeepers’asthmatic heroine, continually puts herself in situations that would have self-aware Scream types throwing their hands up in disgust, as she wanders alone through an old hotel, brandishing an EVP recorder and trying to summon the shade of a woman who hanged herself years ago. Paxton is bored. She and her coworker Pat Healy comprise the skeleton staff watching over the Yankee Pedlar Inn on its last weekend open, and the handful of guests require little of their attention. The two amateur ghost-hunters hope to document evidence of the spirit of Madeline O’Malley in their last days of employment, though they get far more than they bargained for when she starts actually showing up.

For much of the film, Paxton and Healy hang out in a way that will be familiar to anyone whose job has ever involved a lot of downtime with little welcome distraction. A surly mother and her son escaping from a domestic dispute check out, a former actress turned psychic healer (Kelly McGillis) and a strange elderly man (George Riddle) check in. The Yankee Pedlar, a real location in Connecticut, isn’t terribly atmospheric in itself, which West uses to the film’s great benefit—the camera glides down the hallways like a stalking apparition, and slowly, the piano in the lobby, the laundry room, and even the garage become ripe with supernatural potential. Nothing ghostly takes place for a long time, but whenThe Innkeepers leaves open the possibility that the haunting is all in Paxton’s head, that doesn’t make the final sequence any less frightening, as the fabric of mundanity shreds and the vulnerability of the aimless protagonist becomes painfully evident. Paxton plays a character who’s never taken an active role in anything, a quality that in The Innkeepers seems to provide a kind of paranormal precariousness. The prospect of getting stuck in a minimum-wage job takes on new and terrifying meaning.

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THE VILLAGE VOICE

Nick Pinkerton Feb 01, 2012

Ti West, the 34-year-old writer-director of The Innkeepers, has spent the past several years steadily toiling his way through the ranks of horror filmmaking. His little-seen apprenticeship cheapies (The Roost, Trigger Man) led to a disowned, freelance gross-out job (Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever) and then finally a name-above-the-title breakthrough with 2009’s The House of the Devil, which showed a quantum leap in West’s control over his material and proved the thesis that, to mangle a Godard-ism, all you need to make a scary movie is a girl and an old building.

The Innkeepers, another marked refinement of technique that runs with the same idea, takes place almost entirely on the premises of the Yankee Pedlar, a three-story turn-of-the-last-century hotel located on what might be the Main Street of any smallish, down-on-its-heels Northeastern city. It’s the Pedlar’s last weekend of operation, and the skeleton crew of Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) is sleeping over, trading off shifts at the front desk. Since the hotel is nearly empty, however, Claire and Luke devote most of their attention not to the guests but to investigating supernatural goings-on in the hotel. With a mic cued to EVP frequencies, the pair tries to collect solid evidence of haunting-via-suicide-case Madeline O’Malley, whose ghost Luke claims he has seen wandering the halls.

West’s Devil, which followed its female protagonist, Samantha, through an evening of house-sitting, created rising tension out of banal incidents (discordant family photos, unopened doors, a pizza delivery) that weren’t particularly menacing by themselves but, imbued with sinister, uncanny implications, made for a suffocating slow-burn. This was fueled largely by a viewer’s teasing knowledge of horrors just outside Samantha’s view, a privileged vantage that Innkeepers does away with, as though West is seeing how many support pegs he can knock away while still holding up our attention. In a genre lately given to gluttonous effects, West is the rare minimalist. Here, our almost complete POV identification with Claire is established early; when she puts on headphones, the soundtrack becomes muffled. (One of the few exceptions is made in order to not show something horrible.) Innkeepers stretches Devil‘s withholding further and creates a blank canvas of nonevents against which the slightest incident, like a piano key that pounds down by itself, takes on an undue significance and becomes something monumental.

Of course, something does eventually happen, but the throttling shift of The Innkeepers‘ last act would be too little, too late if West hadn’t already found traction in his movie’s routine world. Paxton, the fine-featured, dimple-chinned blonde who managed to shine through the murk of the remade Last House on the Left and Shark Night 3D, gives a performance that’s spunky and charming without being cloying. (Although her tomboyish adorability challenges the premise of Claire being abandoned at work for the weekend—you can’t imagine this single girl behind a desk for any amount of time without collecting a dozen guys who’d find any excuse to hang around.) The dynamic between Claire and Luke is clearly written without overpunctuation: She’s straight out of high school, teenaged sulkiness moving directly into an adult’s no-prospects despair. Luke is maybe 10 years older and 10 years sadder, camouflaging a hopeless crush on Claire with affected older-brotherly forbearance, while she blithely overlooks it with innocently cruel obliviousness. (Luke’s prospects are made clear in a single reaction shot where Claire wrinkles her nose upon catching a glimpse of his sagging tighty-whities.)

The Innkeepers also has a good eye for the details of crummy shift work, including a bit of nicely played physical comedy involving humping trash into a Dumpster, which will be horribly familiar to service-industry vets. In another scene, Claire and Luke, beer-buzzed and bored, act out a burlesque of the hotel’s ghosts to exorcise the tension. This bit of nose-thumbing into the dark recalls a similar defiant release in Devil, where star Jocelin Donahue Jazzercised her way through foreboding corridors in a safe bubble of Walkman noise. It’s this youthful denial of vulnerability that makes West’s slow-sidling haunted-house movies work. He understands the kidding way that his audience approaches horror and seems to play along with that jokey imperviousness—until rudely tearing up the all-in-good-fun contract, gouging us with actual pain. The Innkeepers is so loaded with false scares and cautious treading toward nothing that when freshly spilled blood suddenly flashes on-screen, the shock is really alarming, a return to the scrambling, clambering fear of death that is at the center of these silly horror movies.

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