Solid follow-up to The House of the Devil, but lacking that film's punch

I just saw The Innkeepers after recently enjoying Ti West's The House of the Devil for the first time. This one, not as much, but it started to grow on me a bit. As with House of the Devil, West takes his sweet time here, to a more extreme degree, even. But while I dug watching Samantha in that first film, oftentimes I was rather bored with the goings-on of Claire and Luke, the two innkeepers on duty at a nearly vacant, quaint old hotel that is about to permanently close. And that's no surprise, since that kind of job is mostly spent on mundane time-killing. Things pick up once Claire sees a ghost of the hotel's legendary figure, a jilted bride from over a century ago who hung herself, with the hotel owners hiding her body in the basement. A neat, creepy scene with high tension occurs when Claire and Luke descend into the basement to make contact with this spirit. We don't see anything here but it chilled me a bit with how it was directed.

I could sort of see the ending coming (we were shown Claire puffing on her inhaler at several points during the film, so you figure her asthma would come into play at some point, perhaps in a devastating way). I had to go back and re-play the final shot of the film, showing Claire's room. While first watching it, I thought I must be missing something, and after reading a plot synopsis I went back to see that a very faint apparition of the deceased Claire becomes visible by the window, before the door slams shut. Pretty cool. Overall, a decent indie The Shining type of deal (but obviously this baby is no The Shining). I'd rate this film 6/10.






Fighting the frizzies, at 11.