When we see a young couple driving down a deserted road late at night, and their car starts making funny noises, and they stop at a seedy motel with a lone night manager, and the manager takes a little extra time deciding which room to put them in, the question isn’t so much “What will happen?”––––unless Tim Curry bursts onto the scene in fishnets––––as “Will it be done well?” Clearly, the couple is in for a rough night. But whether it’s from a knife-wielding psycho or three guys in zombie masks isn’t really the point these days––––what we are worried about is whether the movie will be stupid, or whether it will be smart.
“Vacancy,” directed by Nimród Antal, is very smart. Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale, as David and Amy, the young couple, are two of only seven actors in this lean B-movie gem, which doesn’t feel cheap so much as whittled down to the bones of old-fashioned suspense movies from the days before gore sold like french fries. David and Amy check into the seedy motel and find that the old tapes sitting above the VCR aren’t Hollywood favorites, but cheap, dirty slasher movies. What’s more––––they seem to have been filmed in the room they’re sitting in right now.
It’s a premise simple enough for the teasers, and good enough for an hour of nearly sustained terror of a caliber I haven’t seen in some time. Sitting absolutely alone in my darkened theater (the movie’s cheapness may hurt its box office prospects), I found myself quite simply more on edge than I’ve been during a movie in a long time.
Antal may have made his American debut (he made a well-reviewed Hungarian film called “Kontroll”) with an inconsequential and frankly low-class movie, but what he’s done with it bears watching. From the first scene, he makes us uncomfortable with exaggerated shadows and claustrophobic close-ups, which, while certainly not subtle, are acceptable because of the lurid premise. And once the couple becomes the hunted, he and first-time screenwriter Mark L. Smith run through every trick and variation the movie can offer within its limited parameters: turning out lights, sneaking to phone booths, hiding in attics, barricading doors and one nightmarish sequence in which the pursued have to crawl through a series of dingy tunnels with the killers hot on their trail.
There’s a chess-like elegance to movies that take place in one location, when they’re done well. Hitchcock’s “Rope” did it perhaps most elegantly of all, and David Fincher’s “Panic Room” had a showy allure. “Vacancy” may be the least tasteful of the three, but it still has the thrilling, semi-delirious feel of a screenwriter squeezing a premise until he’s wrung every last drop of tension from it.
At 85 minutes, “Vacancy” may also be the most down-to-business thriller since “Run Lola Run,” and what’s particularly impressive is that Wilson and Beckinsale, with only about 15 minutes before they have to get out of the way of the plot, manage to make us care about them the whole time. The twist to the Happy Young Couple premise is that the two are driving home to sign divorce papers; Beckinsale is a bitchy pill-popper and Wilson, in rather a remarkable role, is a lolling oaf who draws out the end of each sentence like there’s nothing to look forward to afterward. And somehow, we find ourselves caring about them so much that the movie’s third-act twist nearly ruins the movie. Having promised us escapism, it comes dangerously close to disturbing, then veers back. The damage is done, though, and the best part of the movie is the middle half hour.
But in a way, like last week’s silly “Disturbia,” “Vacancy” means to be deadly serious. When “seeing a horror movie” these days is synonymous with “watching people get stabbed, beheaded, sawed and disemboweled before your eyes”––––I don’t need to name the movies I’m thinking of––––it’s no coincidence that Antal’s nearly bloodless thriller pits David and Amy against guys bent on turning them into the latest bloodbath spectacle. When Amy asks why anyone would want to watch the two of them trapped and panicky in their motel room, David sneers, “They’re enjoying themselves.” And to the extent that “Vacancy” gives us the same depraved thrills as its in-movie snuff films, it’s a decidedly icky experience. Whether the fact that it’s done so well that you can’t help but enjoy yourself makes the movie more legitimate, or all the more dubious, will be up to the viewer.
Grade: B+
