The Skeleton Key is one of those movies that seems better in retrospect than when you're actually watching it.
That's because it's not until the final 10 minutes that one gets to use the film's metaphorical skeleton key to unlock its eerie mystery. Ahh, one will exclaim. So that's what was going on! At this point The Skeleton Key seems much wiser and more entertaining than it did mere seconds earlier as it turns into a sort of tricked-up version of The Ring, but without videotape.
Until then, The Skeleton Key seems like a second-rate mystery thriller. It's a Southern Gothic, taking place mainly on the outskirts of New Orleans in an old plantation house that's sort of a cross between Tara and the rotting mansion of Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, surrounded by old oaks dripping with Spanish moss.
It's not long before cliches borrowed from many many creepshow films begin bumping into each other. A thunderstorm. Flickering lights. Creaky floorboards. An attic that no one has entered in 40 years. A dusty, well-worn book filled with instructions on how to draw pentagrams. Black magic spells. A witch doctor. The skeleton key (yes, there's also a real one) that can open every door, save the one to the forbidden attic.
There are a few "new" eerie things to ponder, too. Why are there no mirrors in the house? Why has a bedridden stroke victim scrawled "HELP ME" on a dirty sheet? What are we to make of a scratchy 78 rpm record that seems to be some sort of sing-songy religious ceremony?
Of course there's also the heroine, played by the radiant Kate Hudson with a mixture of pluck and dread curiosity, who is forever going into cobwebbed places trying to figure out the film's central mystery.
Although The Skeleton Key has most of the ingredients of a horror film, director Iain Softley (the ethereally offbeat K-PAX, The Wings of the Dove) goes for eerie rather than jump-out-of-your-chair jolts. There's an ever-present ominous feeling to the goings-on in this old house on the edge of a Louisiana swamp. The black-and-white flashbacks to long-ago dreadful moments are sinister and recall moments in The Ring. But as the clichés pile up, right down to an escape attempt thwarted by a heavy locked gate, one gets that "been there-done that" feeling.
Hudson's Caroline Ellis is a heart-on-her-sleeve caregiver who takes a job at the old manse to minister to the bedridden stroke victim, Ben (John Hurt). Ben's wife is a grouchy old woman named Violet (Gena Rowlands in an ode to Bette Davis-Joan Crawford roles) who harbors more secrets than she's willing to cough up. Violet is the one who decrees that there be no mirrors in the house and that no one enters the attic.
Of course Caroline, like all winsome movie thriller heroines, soon goes about hanging mirrors, exploring dark corners and trying to get into the attic. But when she inevitably does get in, the payoff seems more dime-store trick or treat trickery than EEEEK!
Yet Hudson is so appealing and Peter Sarsgaard so happy-go-lucky as Violet's lawyer, who seems to be the only sane character at the house, that one keeps hoping something original will develop. It does, in a spooky Twilight Zone-ish ending that nearly makes up for the dreck that one has waded through before.
**1/2
The Skeleton Key
Starring: Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, Peter Sarsgaard, Joy Bryant, John Hurt.
Rated: PG-13, contains violence.
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