THE INNKEEPERS (2011)

This film is writer-director Ti West's followup to The House of the Devil and faithfully follows the same formula of steadily mounting tension and slow-cooked creepiness but this time on a slightly larger scale.  Not just a house but a whole hotel.  Not just one night but a whole weekend.  Not one protagonist but two, a man and a woman.  Instead of a handful of supporting characters, there are uh two handfuls.  This film might also seem deliberately retrograde but it is not set in the past or made to look like it was produced in the past like THOTD.  And of course the biggest difference is g-g-g-g-ghosts!

This film is set at the Yankee Pedlar Inn, a New England hotel that's preparing to shut down after years of declining business.  Apparently, this is a real hotel that the cast and crew stayed at whilst filming West's previous film.  One look around and West must have decided it would be an ideal location for a ghost story.  It's hard to disagree and the Inn itself quickly becomes one of the focal characters.  There is nothing overtly sinister about the locale and that kinda makes it creepier; it looks like the hotel was decorated by an old married couple in the 1950's and never really updated.  Everything is just tired, worn out, brown, gray and a constant reminder of death.

Luke and Claire (played by Pat Healy and Sara Paxton) are the last two employees of the Inn, manning a skeleton crew for the final weekend of business.  Their only guests are a mother and son, an ancient widower who wants to revisit the honeymoon suite of his youth, and an 80's TV actress turned psychic played by Kelly McGillis.  A toxic mix of boredom and curiosity leads Luke and Claire to exploration, investigation and the creation of a clip art heavy website, all regarding the supposed haunting of their hotel by a jilted bride who died their decades earlier.

There is an interesting theme in this film about broken relationships.  The ghost they are hunting is a woman who took her own life when her would-be husband abandoned her.  One of the guests is a widower who misses his wife so desperately that he revisits their honeymoon suite.  Another guest is a woman (and young son) who just left her husband.  The owner of the hotel, the father figure, has left the country for a tropical vacation.  And Luke eventually confesses to Claire that most of his interest is the paranormal was just a way to get her interested in him, but she is either oblivious or indifferent to his affections.

~ Take a look at the real hotel's website for a sneak peek of the banal dread.

~ Long tracking shots, a bathtub, and of course the hotel setting are just a few of the many homages to The Shining.

~ Lena Dunham, creator and star of HBO's Girls, has a cameo as a chatty barista.

~ I mentioned that Ti West is a writer-director but he is also his own editor which is pretty amazing.

~ SPOILER
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   SPOILER
    Was it all in her head?  Claire is the instigator and sole witness to all paranormal activity.  Did she just get herself worked up?