Skeleton Key

Rating: ***
Director: Iain Softley
Cast: Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, John Hurt and Peter Sarsgaard

Review:
Note: This is a film with some interesting plot twists, so this review will go out of its way not to spoil them.

Skeleton Key is an entertaining spooker that may be undercut by genre expectations. You hear it’s a horror film, and you expect nonstop terror, monsters or slashers, constant terror. This film is a little more subtle than that, because it is not about a world of horror, but a psychological journey from cold reality to the damp, dark corners of superstition and the supernatural.

Kate Hudson is a New Orleans hospice nurse hired to take care of a paralyzed John Hurt, whose post-stroke condition is too much for wife Gena Rowlands to handle. Hudson discovers that her employers’ huge old plantation-style house has a history of the supernatural — or rather, of superstitious residents who believed in that baseless claptrap. She starts to suspect that Hurt, at the least, may have been felled by such fears rather than by a medical condition. The rising tension in the film involves the nature of the superstitious belief and whether it is, in fact, real.

While the film offers a satisfyingly frenetic ending — with a number of unexpected plot twists that make the film worth seeing — the first two acts are pretty tame. If you see this kind of movie because you want Jason Voorhees to jump out from behind every door starting within the first six minutes, you won’t like this. You have to want to go along with Kate and tease out this little mystery.

The film has much in common with Dark Water, out earlier this season, in that respect. Both have strong female leads caught in a situation in which the psychological and the supernatural mix, and the audience is uncertain until the end to what degree, if any, true mysticism plays any part.

The film hangs, then, not on high-tension theatrics, but on Kate Hudson. She’s engaging as a likeable young woman who, with a dying invalid on her hands, takes it upon herself to try to solve the mystery of the voodoo-connected history of her patient’s house. She’s a positive, take-charge woman in a film with more realism than Buffy or Alias, in which being a strong woman entails martial-arts fights. Kate comes off as a strong woman you’re more likely to actually know, And she is more interesting to watch here than in many of the light comedies that have been her specialty to date.

That said, this is a suspense/horror film, and the lack of high-octane thrills is detrimental. Writer Ehren Kruger, who adapted “The Ring” for American audiences, and director Iain Softley (“K-PAX”) are more interested in spinning out their tale and building to a conclusion than in jolting you out of your seat every ten seconds like some amusement park haunted house. Unfortunately, by putting all their eggs in the third-act basket, the film has the same problem that last “Lord of the Rings” movie had — no, not being four days long, just having too many endings. “Skeleton Key” ends on a great shot of a key character lighting a cigarette that’s subtle and surprising. Then it keeps going, and ends two minutes later. And another nice ending comes after that. All good stuff, but you really feel like the filmmakers couldn’t just pick the right beat, so they put in several.

Final word: Here’s where you have to make your call — You want thrill-a-minute, this ain’t the movie. You want moody atmospherics, nice camera work and a creepy feeling that something’s wrong, mixed in with a strong cast and some nice punch at the end, this is a movie to see.

Tags: horror, kate hudson