Who's been sleeping in my bed?

The Resident (2011)

I know I promised this wouldn't turn into a Hammer blog, but what can you do, the company is back in business and I'm very interested to see their movies. Add to that the fact that this is Finnish director Antti Jokinen's first feature film so this one was pretty much a must see. Jokinen has done some quite nice music videos so I was expecting the visual side to be well in hand. Well it was and it wasn't, the opening credits got my hopes up but unfortunately the individual style ended there. Sure the movie looked good, but it surely wasn't anything special, kind of like any random horror flick out there that is done by a somewhat talented crew. The lack of personal style didn't end to the look of the film, the script was quite crap, offered absolutely nothing new to the table. The start was quite nice and got me quickly into the movie being a nice haunted house/creepy neighbour story, but unfortunately it stayed that way. The story is about this doctor who moves to a new appartment that looks to be too good to be true. The land lord seems to be a nice chap and and the rent is cheap. Though there is the nightly train running under it that shakes the whole building and her neighbour is a creepy old man, played by none other than the face of Hammer, Christopher Lee. Soon the viewer is shown that someone is watching the woman through the walls and the thriller starts. The cast is fairly ok, not bad by any means but didn't really shine either, Hilary Swank managing the best out of them. The technical side is in a good order, it looks and sounds spooky when it needs to and looks and sounds good when it doesn't. So nothing to complain there. The major problem is the lack of originality, the weak script would have needed some more personal approach or this technical side a lot better script. Which ever way, this way it just doesn't work. And that's a shame as I had my hopes up for Antti Jokinen, that finally we could get a Finnish director with some vision and not just technical knowledge. Looks like we didn't.
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