Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Check
in Any Time You Like
(Vacancy, 4/30/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
The
slick, smug Disturbia may rule at the box office, but it's not
the creepiest feature at the multiplex these days. That would be Nimrod
Antal's short (just 80-minute) nightmare, Vacancy. Antal (Kontrol)
hails from Hungary—a place better known for its paprikash and its
baffling language than for the quality of its thrillers. But by eschewing
the usual Hollywood over-production in favor of a taut, sharp economy,
Antal gives the retro impression of a guy who loves movies, not someone
who just likes being a movie director.
David and Amy Fox (Luke Wilson and
Kate Beckinsale) are late-night travelers who have foolishly left the
interstate to chase an illusory "short cut." When their car
breaks down, they find themselves the sole customers of an isolated
motel run by a shifty clerk (Frank Whaley). There are roaches in the
linens and some kind of brown slurry coming out of the faucet, but those
are the least of the Foxes' problems: instead of the usual selection
of hotel porn, the room comes furnished with a collection of snuff tapes.
Worse, the tapes seem to have been shot in that very room, and feature
the motel's prior guests as their victims.
Sure, the set-up sounds like something
a garter belt and time-warp away from Rocky Horror Picture Show
("We'll just stay where we are, and go back to the car…")
Indeed, Antal flirts with the camp factor with an opening credit sequence
that seems borrowed from the vaults of TV legend Quinn Martin (Barnaby
Jones, Cannon). But when the torture begins, Vacancy has
a whiff of the corn-fed freakishness of David Lynch, combined with the
razor-tension of Psycho (which, like Rocky Horror, had
its share of transvestites). When we first meet the Foxes they are sniping
at each other, still in pain after the death of their young son and
hurtling toward divorce. Yet the couple's grief is only the film's equivalent
of the stolen cash in Psycho—a neat bit of thematic misdirection
made more poignant by how quickly it pales in the larger scheme of things.
Nothing like a little mortal danger, it seems, to smooth those irreconcilable
differences.
Hang-dog Luke Wilson (Old School,
My Super Ex-Girlfriend) has never been easy to confuse with his
blonder, more successful brother, Owen (Wedding Crashers, Zoolander).
Indeed, watching him play the defensive, repressed David, you might
anticipate wanting to yell "a**hole" at the screen every time
he appears (a la Brad in Rocky Horror). But the lumpen Wilson
makes a surprisingly fine match with the gossamer-thin Beckinsale, who
needs an anchor to avoid being wafted away to that special heaven where
cosmetic models flit.
Though few will be particularly
shocked by the film's final act, it is surprising in one respect. Considering
that moviegoers are now programmed to expect the killer is not quite
dead the first time he's killed, it seems almost subversive that Vacancy
has only one ending. In this sense the film could have taken more time
to unfold. Along with the Lynchian grim and Hitchcockian chills, it
could have used some of the erotic perversity of Roman Polanski—if
not Tim Curry in a bustier, then maybe glimpses of a few more tormented
couples trapped in their hotel rooms, cooking in the juices of their
particular flaws. The result may well have proven the rule, adapted
from a line in Apocalypse Now: never get off the interstate .
. . unless you're ready to go all the way.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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