The Films of Nimrod Antal

Kontroll

Vacancy (April 18/07)

While Vacancy certainly does an effective job of keeping he viewer thoroughly engaged throughout its refreshingly brisk running time, there's little doubt that the film starts to fall apart once one starts to really mull over its various plot twists in hindsight. The spare storyline - which follows Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale's bickering married couple as they find themselves trapped within the confines of an increasingly sinister motel - offers up the barest hints of character development before kicking things into high gear, yet somehow the whole thing works; director Nimrod Antal, working from Mark L. Smith's tight screenplay, has infused the proceedings with a palpable sense of dread (that the movie opens with a distinctly Hitchockian credits sequence certainly doesn't hurt). It's consequently easy enough to overlook Smith's sporadic reliance on horror movie cliches, including some unreasonably moronic decisions on the part of the two central characters (ie the couple seems to have a knack for taking precisely the wrong course of action at any given point). And although Wilson and Beckinsale are quite good here, Frank Whaley - cast as said motel's sleazy manager - immediately proves to be the film's most entertaining element (Whaley transforms his underwritten character into a figure that rivals Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates in terms of pure creepiness). Ironically, despite its various deficiencies, Vacancy is a far more effective B-movie than either of Grindhouse's two efforts and it's clear that the film achieves exactly the sort of fun, fast-paced vibe that both Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino were undoubtedly going for in their own films.