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August 19, 2005 > Arts & Entertainment > In haunted mansion, even the ‘Skeleton’ looks bored

In haunted mansion, even the ‘Skeleton’ looks bored

By Jonathan Schumann | Thresher Editorial Staff

The Skeleton Key looks like a haunted house thriller. It takes place in a large mansion in rural Louisiana, complete with a “Keep Out” sign on the driveway. Trees drip an ominously abundant amount of moss. It even has a crocodile-infested bayou nearby. Inside, the mansion feels like the “Haunted House” ride at Disneyworld, complete with plenty of dark corridors and an attic that hides more than just family photo albums and last season’s fashions.

But thanks to star Kate Hudson (Almost Famous), the movie is really all about sleepwalking. A promising idea — the legacy of witchcraft in the gothic South — is strangled by a bord-looking actress.

Hudson plays Caroline Ellis, a hospice worker so fed up with the businesslike treatment of death in hospitals that she decides to take a job as a live-in nurse outside of New Orleans. There, she cares for Ben Deveroux (Alien’s John Hurt), the victim of an apparent stroke. Her boss is Ben’s steely wife Violet, played with refreshing gusto by The Notebook’s Gena Rowlands. As soon as Caroline becomes acquainted with her employers, she begins to uncover the house’s strange nature. All of the mirrors have been stripped from the walls. The basement has a secret door. Ben is so frightened of his surroundings that he attempts to take his life.

Director Iain Softley (K-Pax) mines a lot of suspense from this intriguing premise and makes great use of the setting. Just as he captured the intricacies of Henry James’ Europe in The Wings of the Dove, here he immerses his camera in the murky house and its surrounding areas. One of the film’s few achievements is that it captures the underlying mystery and allure of rural Louisiana. As the film progresses and Caroline begins to uncover the house’s strange history — the murder of two witchcraft-practicing servants in the 1920s — one begins to yawn.

As Caroline goes through the motions of creepy-movie investigations — complete with a trip to a witch doctor — Hudson looks bored stiff. She seems either unable or unwilling to allow any emotion to creep across her face. Caroline when scared looks a lot like Caroline when happy, which looks strikingly similar to Caroline when concerned. Acting opposite the legendary Rowlands, who became an icon in the 1970s for starring in husband John Cassavetes’ films, certainly does not aid her cause. Rowlands conveys more emotion with the bat of an eye than Hudson does in the entire picture.

Peter Sarsgaard (Kinsey) and Joy Bryant (Antwone Fisher) fill out the main cast as Ben and Violet’s lawyer and Caroline’s best friend, respectively. Sarsgaard, with his John Malkovich-esque voice softened to a Southern drawl, does what he can with the thankless role.

Inane as it is, the film’s climax, which features Hudson sporting a drowned rat look as she does battle with the supernatural in the middle of a thunderstorm, does provide a few good jolts.

The Skeleton Key’s disappointment is ironic. The film’s release comes only a few days after Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte, a classic haunted house thriller starring Bette Davis, became available on DVD. That film, about a Southern spinster (Davis) driven crazy by her sadistic, greedy cousin (Olivia de Havilland), provided a compelling set-up played to the hilt by two of Hollywood’s best actresses. Even though the two films share only setting and genre in common, they prove the same point: Without a dynamic actor for the audience to believe, the scares just don’t feel the same.

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