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The Yankee Pedlar is a historic hospitality hotel with over 100 years of service that comes with its own notorious past and haunted tidings. On the verge of closing for good, the Yankee Pedlar has one more weekend to remain open and house guests but with only a handful of rooms occupied, there’s not much else to do for the two innkeepers, Claire and Luke. As a way to pass the time, Claire is eager to video capture spooky events to feed into Luke’s website based off the hotel’s history in the death of Madeline O’Malle, a bride to be who committed suicide on her wedding day when the finance no-showed and her corpse was left to rot for 3 days in the basement as hotel owners feared for bad publicity, but when eerie begin to plague, call for her, with visions of a bloodied O’Malle in a white gown, Claire finds herself in the dangerous company with a permanent guest at the dying hotel.
Ti West, the established genre director with the famed “X” trilogy, kept audiences pale in fear and the hairs on the back of their neck stiff and straight up with his written-and-directed horror films that retained staying power amongst fans. 2009’s “The House of the Devil” is considered one of the more recent better throwback horrors of our time surrounding classic tropes like a satanic cult and a home alone babysitter. West’s 2011 film “The Innkeepers” comes at a rebound time when his commercial picture, “Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever”, sequel to Eli Roth’s breakthrough hit from 2002 about a flesh-eating virus, didn’t quite feel like his film and “The Innkeepers” also hit a little different by shielding audiences from any type of horrific, on screen splatter violence and be concentrated on pure fear of the senses. Though narratively set in perhaps Pennsylvania due to some references of towns an hour outside of Philadelphia, “The Innkeepers” was actually filmed more North in Connecticut with the real-life Yankee Pedlar building. Larry Fessenden (“The Last Winter,” “Rehab”) of Glass Eye Pix and Derek Curl of Darksky Pictures co-produce the film along with Peter Phok and Ti West.
In the two principal roles of Claire and Luke is “Barbarian’s” Sara Paxton as an unmotivated hotel clerk coasting until the very, bitter end and “Cheap Thrill’s” Pat Healy as a blasé and uninterested front desk colleague interested in getting on the popular haunted house train with his own website about their employer’s centenarian hotel. Paxton inarguably shoulders much of the screentime as the girl who cried wolf when she experience’s the sounds of a wolf, aka the spooky serenades of one Madeline O’Malle, and the visual eviscerations of her bloodied corpse that would scare the bejesus out of anyone. However, the frights are not enough to seemingly strike fear in Paxton’s shield of composure or even enough to put West’s story to rest with a simple I’m outta here as most of us chickens would flock toward the exit on the first instance waking from a vivid dream too real for comfort. Healy ultimately steals the primary performance away from Paxton with his own gruff and irritated by everything: the hotel, the guests, his own pitiful existence. Healy does a nice job creating that subtle tension between Luke and Claire, knowing Luke’s own hangups lie somewhere in between and haven’t been exposed yet, all the while being a sarcastic boor for most of the time. There are also side characters in the form of random guests occupying the skeleton-crewed hotel bringing with them their own set of baggage. One of guests is Kelly McGillis and the “Top Gun” actress, in a bit of a meta-role of an aging actress turned mystic. There’s also Alison Bartlett (Gina from various Sesame Street shows and specials) and Jake Ryan (“Asteroid City”) as scorned wife and her son and the peculiar older gentlemen, played by George Riddle, who requests a special room and will not take no for an answer. One of the more curious castings is Girls’ Lena Dunham as a coffeeshop barista in a one and only brief scene that doesn’t add really anything to the whole in a pointlessly random interaction with Claire that, perhaps, plays off Claire’s repetitiveness and stasis life of going there everyday but not really knowing much about the barista, who is apparently always there too.
Juggling between the blended tones of comedy and horror, Ti West doesn’t commingle the two directly into one scene, keeping distinction for one or the other in their individualized moments. This leaves little room for alleviating dread levity inside the scare moment after building tension and fear of being chased or waiting for the silence to be broken but an unsuspected jump scare. Outside the context of the fright-filled moment, back and forth quips and playful antics between Luke and Claire as two bored and starved for company innkeepers in the hotel’s waning days are delivered in brightly lit rooms and mostly shared with another person to be a telltale safe space against the malevolence of serrating spook-house intensity that often lingers and waits on with bated breath. In the innermost between is Claire’s internal struggle to cope with the impending outcome that there is nothing on the horizon for her. No secure job, no ambitions, no plans of any kind are seemingly providing the character with no hope and in that stagnation, she desperately holds onto what’s nearby – Luke’s interest in the Yankee Pedlar’s hauntings. Enhanced by the odd actions and placement of the modicum of guests – McGillis as a crystal charm intuitive and Riddle as a strange-enough older man with a specific room fascination – Claire motivation to reveal Madeline O’Malle becomes tenfold because of her unconscious lack to move forward in life, which then spurs the question, is Claire’s experiences grounded in truth or are they just a downspout of manifestations induced compensation? You’ll have to be the judge.
Like “House of the Devil,” another of Ti West films makes the Second Sight Film cut onto a newly restored 4K scanned UHD Blu-ray release. “The Innkeepers” HVEC encoded, 2160p ultra high-definition, BD100 has the true presence of quality video with a gradual improvement in the finer details of a greater pixel count inside the HDR with Dolby Vision. Though digitally recorded with a no imperfections to note from previous releases, Second Sight’s release does appear sharper and deeper around the black levels that often improve with better resolution and suitable compression and with a good portion of the story taking place in the dark recesses of a hotel basement and the in the shadows of unlit rooms, there’s no visual compression issue or loss of expected detail. Contrastively, darker scenes appear more lit by a lower contrast but still, the details are there in depth and in closeup. The English DTS-HD 5.1 surround sound audio track diffuses the spread of atmospheric creepiness – ghosts whispers, nondiegetic bangs and clangs, and a Jeff Grace building orchestral score that keeps the heart bumping (think Richard Band’s “Re-Animator” but with more lulls”). Dialogue is prominently clear and in front of the aforesaid layers with depth mostly between Claire and Luke’s conversing in the lobby and range limited to, again, the aforesaid. English subtitles are available. Though this review is catered to the limited edition, rigid slipbox release full of tangible goodies, the standard release does have encoded a small army of special features that has two audio commentaries with the first including Ti West, producer Larry Fessenden of Glass Eye Pix, producer Peter Phok, and sound designer Graham Reznick and the second commentary also West but with principal actors Sara Paxton and Pat Healy. A slew of new interviews provide a well-rounded, in-depth look at the creative design as It West A Lasting Memory, Pat Healy Let’s Make This Good, Larry Fessenden Our Dysfunctional World, director of photography Eliot Rockett Living in the Process, composer Jeff Grace Cast a Wide Net, and line producer Jacob Jaffke A Validating Moment contribute to the retrospective. Special features round out with archival behind-the-scenes and the trailer. The physical presence of Second Sight’s “The Innkeepers” keeps in-line with previous standard edition 4K releases with a black Amaray case and a monochromic grayish illustrative cover art setting audiences up for ghostly expectations. The UK certified 15 release contains strong horror, gore, language, and sex reference – though the gore is subtle and definitely not over-the-top or even explicit. This particular UK release, that has a runtime of 101 minutes, is region free and presented in a widescreen 2.40:1 aspect ratio.
Last Rites: “The Innkeepers” works, if not wriggles, into the brain, much like the invasive worthlessness inside Claire’s swirling mind, and the Second Sight Films’ 4K UHD Blu-ray is an ultimate celebration of not only the film itself, but also the venerable work of the horror genre’s freshest master Ti West.
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