SKELETON KEY
Movie Reviews
Before I get too far into �The Skeleton Key,� let�s recap the funda-mentals of scary movies with houses and women. 1) The woman is a hot twenty-something-year-old. 2) The house is old and dusty. 3) There is a hidden room in the house that holds many secrets. 4) The hot twenty-something-year-old will stumble upon the room and discover the secrets. 5) All hell will break loose at the expense the hot twenty-something-year-old.
In �The Skeleton Key,� Kate Hudson plays Caroline, a nurse at a hospice center in Louisiana. When one of her patients dies and no one in his family will claim his personal items, she decides she�s had enough of caretaking that involves no caring. She says goodbye to her friend and drives an hour away to an old swamp town to answer an ad in the newspaper. The ad called for a full-time, one-on-one caretaker, and so Caroline figures it�s only an hour away, she can always visit her friend back in town, and it�s a one-on-one deal. As she puts it, she can finally live her way.
She arrives at the house and is greeted by no one; so consequently, we get our first dose of Kate Hudson walking into a strange building yelling, �hello...is anyone here?�
Out back waits Violet (Gena Rowlands), Ben (John Hurt), and Luke (Peter Sarsgaard). Violet and Ben are married and probably in their 70s. Violet explains that Ben has recently had a stroke and can no longer speak or walk. Violet is extremely protective of him and is hesitant to hire Caroline. Luke is there to help update their will. He stops by far too often.
As you might have guessed, Caroline proves to be too curious for her own good (and ours). She asks too many questions that have nothing to do with her actual job there at the house, and instead inquires about why there aren�t any mirrors in the house and family history. If you ask me, Violet should be a little more suspicious.
Around here, director Iain Softley gives us a lot of shots of Kate Hudson wearing skimpy, little outfits to bed, and taking showers. I don't necessarily think he was putting this stuff in just to put it in. I think he was trying to make her more vulnerable; peeling away her layers, if you will. It's a technique Hitchock used; the reason why all of Hitchcock's leading ladies were beautiful. But regardless, Hitchcock always used the simple fact that they were beautiful - he never had to undress them (save "Psycho").
Caroline is given a skeleton key � a key that opens every door in the house. And one day she�s asked to go to the attic to fetch something for Violet. She sees a door hidden away behind an old shelf. Of course, the key won�t open that door. When she finally figures a way into that room, she finds records of s�ances and incantations being read by someone who�s obviously from Louisiana. Her friend back in town just happens to know what it�s all about. It�s something called hoodoo � not a religious thing, but a magic thing.
Later curiosity leads Caroline to the back room of a Laundromat where a hoodoo lady tells her to put a line of brick dust in front of her door. That dust hinders any who means her harm to cross it. So Caroline gets involved in all this stuff, all the while saying she doesn�t believe it. And you know what? We believe her. We believe her because she has the tendency to go into to strange, dark rooms defenseless, and if she believed in hoodoo, she wouldn�t be doing that.
The problem here is that there are too many spells and symbols to understand. It�s not that we have to remember them, but we do need to be familiar with them and writer Ehren Kruger doesn�t give us enough instances where we encounter the spells. It's more that they're all just thrown at us. And it�s not that we need to see them work or not, no, that would spoil the ending.
As for the ending, well, there is closure, but nothing satisfying. The end relies on the spells, but we�ve been so focused on Caroline, Ben, and the brick dust (which turns out not to be that important anyway) that none of it makes much sense. Here�s another movie trumped by mediocrity and style. It seems that the horror genre is being massacred by that a lot lately. **