Toronto After Dark! Mr. Matt Brown on The Innkeepers

Toronto After Dark Night 8

I don’t believe in ghosts -  or didn’t, until about an hour ago, when The Innkeepers succeeded in scaring the proverbial livin’ bejeez’ out of me.

Oh sure, it’s stupid. They all are. Every ghost story told with an upturned flashlight to the chin is as lame-brained as a dumb joke, and The Innkeepers is no exception, but this is a film that delights in the form nonetheless – a campfire yarn through and through. I was impressed by its honesty. The Innkeepers relies not at all on CGI trickery, and very little on special effects of any kind – just some makeup in the final act. The film prefers to build it scares simply, through pacing, anticipation, and pure elemental cinematic technique.

The Innkeepers brought Toronto After Dark to a rattling close, starting (as has been some sort of undeclared, unwanted TAD tradition all week) about 45 minutes late and preceded by 15 more minutes of Adam Lopez making the audience clap like monkeys for every single person or thing he could think of. It’s the end of a long week for the festival, and I understand. But why does this festival run Thursday-Thursday? If it’s 8 days long, and ran Friday-Friday instead, then at least we could go out drinking after the opening night gala and the closing night gala. Some of us have to be at work in the morning, and aren’t gonna sleep much tonight anyway, for fear of unholy spectres of the undead rising in the bed beside us.

I’ve just come from a night in that gloomy old battleship of the downtown core, the Royal York Hotel, so perhaps I was a little more than usually susceptible to the milieu. The Innkeepers is a surprising, low-key closer to the howling madness that Toronto After Dark aspires to. It is about a pair of slacker/stoner amateur ghost-hunters spending their last weekend as the caretakers of an old hotel about to be closed down. Sara Paxton plays the lead, and shows herself to have the gifts of a fine physical comedian. She teases out great humour, and greater naturalism, from a script that creaks its way around awkward contrivances more than once.

But The Innkeepers improves steadily as it goes along, and by the time Paxton has set her sights on solving the great unsolved ghost story of the Yankee Pedlar Hotel before it is closed forever – aided by no less a presence than Kelly McGillis, who gives another master class in fluid genre performance here – the film becomes a damned spooky ride. It telegraphs its punches more than once, but the dread of what’s coming ably compensates for any obviousness in the storytelling.

And again, there’s just charisma to be had in a film that is making do with the oldest resources of cinema. The Innkeepers is shot in what I presume to be a real inn. It is photographed unobtrusively but with an eye to style. It is edited, impressively, by Ti West, who also wrote and directed it. On more than one occasion, the film allows us to use our imaginations to conjure the ghosts we watch characters see, rather than turning a vulgar camera on them for us to see for ourselves. The good ghost stories told at slumber parties and campsites, the ones with those upturned flashlights, felt like magic tricks. The Innkeepers does too.