Writer-director Ti West very neatly blended lavish servings of comedy to the mix when writing his most recent chiller, The Innkeepers. Recently, at the Melbourne International Film Festival, he claimed a shift in pace was required after the relentless darkness of his previous film, the 80’s set shocker, The House of the Devil (2009).
The set-up of West’s break-out film is deceptively simple, with the director relying on the full range of his manipulative powers to pull off the visceral horror when it finally arrives. A college girl, Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), is desperate for release from the dormitory she shares with free-love advocating roommate. She’s just secured a rental place of her own but needs fast money to keep herself afloat.
By chance, she notices a college noticeboard advertisement offering cash for babysitting duties. Reluctantly she makes the call, only to be given the run around initially. Then best friend Megan (Greta Gerwig) sabotages the prospects of all other potential applicants ensuring Samantha ends up with the job. But it’s one she’ll regret agreeing to before this long night and not coincidentally, the night of a full moon is through.
The location she’s been summoned to should be warning enough, it’s well off the beaten track in a creepy old mansion nestled in the woods. The occupants are even creepier the towering, sinister Mr.Ulman (Tom Noonan) is evasive at first, admitting there’s actually no baby in the house, only an ill old woman who’ll prove to be no trouble at all. Really Samantha, her implores her, my wife (an equally creepy Mary Woronov) and I really need somebody here tonight until just after midnight (ominously) so take a load off, order a pizza, watch TV, the frail old thing on the top floor will probably require absolutely no ministration at all.
The baby may be absent but there is a When a Stranger Calls feel about West’s premise. A young woman in a house, performing a simple duty for cash: what could be simpler? But is she alone or not? For West, the weight of expectation is his sharpest weapon. The first hour establishes the basic scenario, our anticipation and primal dread building for a series of shocks. Samantha explores the house, out of boredom mostly.
One superb sequence sees her bouncing around the house with her Walkman glued to her head. As the song plays on, we hold our breath, but is it just another tease? Patience, more than anything, is required here, for West takes great pleasure in drawing out his bow before allowing the blood-tipped arrow to soar in the kinetically-charged final twenty minutes as all the masks come off.
Though inferior to The Innkeepers, The House of the Devil is a genuinely suspenseful and for the most part admirably restrained genre piece that positively charts West’s development as a filmmaker. Crucially, Donahue gives a fine rendering of the innocent but resourceful Samantha Noonan, his imposing figure a long-time weapon of low-budget directors, does what he does best, i.e. intimidate, whilst Gerwig, whose big break came a year later in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg (2010), is appropriately annoying as the loyal best friend. West’s regular composer Jeff Grace ramps up the atonal rumblings to fever pitch for the third act, adding further credence to the deliciously over the top pay-off.
I say:
A wonderful showcase for its talented director. Though he honed his craft further with The Innkeepers, this is the film that more traditional horror films will genuflect before.
See it for:
The promising Donahue, the nostalgic presence of Noonan and, above all, the deft manipulation of West.
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