Dir. Antti Jokinen, UK/USA, 2011, 91 mins
Cast: Hilary Swank, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Christopher Lee, Lee Pace
Review by Matthew Rodgers
It’s Hammer time once more! The film company’s vampire-like resurrection from a decades long slumber was the unexpectedly brilliant, but little seen and largely ignored, Let Me In. Now the former horror institution gets its second feature up on the big screen (this month’s Wake Wood completes the hat-trick) with this Sleeping with the Enemy rip-off, starring a soft-focus Hilary Swank and a Vince Vaughn as in the Psycho remake standard of loon in the person of Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
Essentially this is what Norman Bates would be doing had he lived in modern day New York and owned an apartment block. Swank is the barely clothed Juliet, a newly single doctor looking for a cheap place to rent. Suspicions should have been aroused, when a newly refurbished river view apartment is advertised by the live in landlord Max (Morgan) for a ridiculously low price. So as well as a fully furnished, beautifully lit, one bedroom place, she gets additional peepholes, windows creepily left open during the night, and a hulking great pervert living in the walls. Bargain!
The fact that it went straight to DVD over the pond should tell you all you need to know about The Resident. It’s surprising because of the talent involved and the gradually unnerving set-up. But it becomes completely understandable when you see the mess this becomes after the signposted but genuinely unexpected and well timed early twist/revelation.
Characters are established over the course of a few quick edits, so we get to see Juliet running (she’s tough), performing surgery (she’s smart), and crying (she’s vulnerable), and then that’s it. Her dialogue is also not of the calibre of a two-time Oscar winner and often results in hilariously bad timing – “I still only know his smell” is a corker worth looking out for.
Saying that, it’s refreshing to see Swank completely stripped (literally in some demographic snaring scenes) of her usual hard edge, happy to play the Jamie Lee-Curtis damsel-in-distress role.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan doesn’t fare well at all playing the unrequited lovestruck landlord and hamming it up in a credibility testing role of fist banging and tantrums. There is one brilliant scene during which he uses Juliet’s toothbrush and gets some sort of sexual gratification from brushing his teeth. You can just imagine director Jokinen telling him to “brush with more intensity”. It’s pure genius and funny for all of the wrong reasons.
Some sequences are relatively effective when it comes to the squeamish factor; one late night home invasion in particular is “finger lickin’ good” and the later CCTV revelations provide the odd grotesque shock.
Its trump card cameo is Hammer legend Christopher Lee, wheeled on as a gimmicky throwback to the kitsch of yesteryear but leering with more unsettling results than Morgan can manage. The Resident is sporadic in quality when it had the potential to be so much more.
god damn this is so good ! Ill come back and check it out. i hope you guys add more content related to this. Later fellas.