Here’s the story. It’s the last weekend for The Yankee Pedlar Inn before it closes and gets razed for a parking lot. The Inn, established in 1891, has been around long enough to generate at least one good ghostly legend, and employees Sara Paxton and Pat Healy mean to get to the bottom of it before they shutter the place.
That’s a fine premise for a “haunted hotel” picture. Now, it’s all about the execution. The Innkeepers executes well by creating an appropriate atmosphere, putting interesting characters in the middle of it, generating suspense, and delivering on the big scares. The Yankee Pedlar actually exists (and it’s still in business – here’s its web site), and it’s everything one could want in an old hotel: quirky, lived-in, and comforting in one light while sinister in another.
Paxton and Healy are relatable and interesting. They’re kinda aimless, kinda dorky, and not very bright; but they have an awkwardly sweet dynamic that plays well against the horror to come. The tension begins to turn when that sweet dynamic starts to stress under the duo’s mounting fear, even as we wonder whether they’re witnessing an
actual haunting or just psyching themselves out. It grows as we come down on one side or the other and realize that either conclusion is equally rich with possibility. It hammers down in the best ways when they explore the basement or try to make contact or go after a mysterious guest. And when the time comes for the big scares, man, they’re big and graphic and scary and earned, because the movie took the time to build up to them.
So it works. It all works. The Innkeepers is as fine a modern ghost story as you’re going to find, and I dare you to try and go right to sleep just after switching it off. As for me, I wish I hadn’t seen it in a hotel.
