The Innkeepers

The Innkeepers is a nifty little ghost story until it comes entirely undone by a bad ending, loose endings stacked like cord wood. For hard core horror fans, it is probably too tame, but director Ti West uses some nice techniques to keep the suspense up.

The setting is an old inn, the Yankee Pedlar (it was filmed at a real inn of that name) on its last weekend before closing. There are only a few guests, including a former sit-com star (Kelly McGillis). The two remaining employees, a guy with an absurd hairstyle (Pat Healy) and a pretty but dorky young woman (Sara Paxton) pursue their amateur ghost hunting. It seems that a woman hung herself over being left at the altar, and the owners put her body in a cellar for three days.

Most of the film has a staple of the genre--the false scare. We get one of almost every type: the prank, the dream, and instead of the usual cat, a bird. But I found West's style, much of it drawn from Stanley Kubrick's horror film in a hotel, The Shining, to be pretty spooky, even if most of it is in brightly lit corridors.

But the film has nowhere to go. A creepy old man checks into the hotel, wanting to spend the night in the same room as his honeymoon. McGillis is now a psychic, and warns Paxton not to go in the basement, where of course she and Healy will go.

I don't want to give away the ending, but it's hopelessly muddled. How does the old man tie into the ghost? McGillis says three spirits are in the inn, but we never know of more than two. And what happens to Paxton?

Besides these unanswered questions, there is a bizarre cameo by Lena Dunham as a barista who shares too much information. Dunham acts exactly like her character on Girls. Weird.