The Innkeepers | Film review

Building a scary movie around the absence of mayhem is always a crapshoot. Withhold the grisly goods for too long—even for the sake of escalating tension—and you risk boring your scream-starved audience to tears. The House of the Devil, 2009’s baby-sitter-in-peril throwback, gambled on suspense and won. It wasn’t the film’s retro-’80s affectations that made it such a treat for discerning horror hounds. It was the way writer-director Ti West turned the act of waiting for something to happen into a nerve-jangling game of hide-and-seek. So persuasive was the suggestion of danger—lurking in the next scene, the next room or just beyond our sight line—that the perfunctory “payoff” played like an afterthought.

With The Innkeepers, West attempts a similar feat of delayed gratification, but this time he forgets to invest the long stretches of inactivity with menace. The poky plot mirrors Devil’s alone-in-the-house scenario, with an asthmatic college dropout (Sara Paxton) pulling a long weekend of graveyard shifts at the haunted hotel that employs her. West stingily metes out the scares at irregular intervals, apparently convinced that his heroine’s bored banter with a fellow desk clerk (Pat Healy) and an aging TV-star-turned-celebrity-psychic (Kelly McGillis) holds more interest. Once the paranormal activity begins in earnest, it’s over before you can say “boo!” There’s no denying West’s promise—he has the patience and steady hand of a young John Carpenter—but The Innkeepers demonstrates what a fine line there is between tightening the screws and spinning your wheels.