The Resident Review

• 28th Jun 2011

At last! Christopher Lee has been reunited with Hammer studios. It must be a match made in heaven, surely? Yes?  Errr no.

Hilary Swank is Juliette, a house-hunting ER doctor with a limited budget who finds the impossible. A huge, newly renovated rental apartment in New York which is going for a pittance, with a hunky landlord (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Watchmen, The Losers, Supernatural) to boot. Even though she should know that it’s too good to be true, she takes it on the spot. And then Christopher Lee turns up as the grandfather of hot landlord Max. Run away!

Obviously she doesn’t (otherwise it’d be a very short film). A few bumps in the night and shadowy figures later and Juliette begins to think that someone’s been in her apartment. And after she rejects Max’s advances and gets back with cheating ex-boyfriend Jack (Lee Pace, Pushing Daisies), we realise that her landlord is the one who’s been spying on her using a network of tunnels and a two way mirror.

Sounds exciting yes? The problem is that it isn’t. While Max’s pervy actions will make you grimace, apart from one jumpy exception in the closing sequence, it’s not very scary. The film’s teeny-weeny running time of 91 minutes also doesn’t help. It spends quite a lot of time at the beginning building on Max and Juliette’s fledgling relationship, leading up to an almost-interesting flashback. But there isn’t enough time to build the tension or develop the plot and it rushes towards its generic running-around-the-house slasher climax. Which all leaves viewer feeling a bit short changed. Not to mention a few gaping plotholes (Swank’s too skint to get a decent apartment but she can afford to put in a state-of-the-art motion activated surveillance system) which I’d ignore if the film delivered on anything it promised.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan is both believable and unbelievable as creepy obsessive Max – for a start he’s way too good looking and charming to be a sweaty nut-job. And he’s a very apologetic stalker, always crying and berating himself for his perviness. Despite this Morgan is (fingerlickin’) good at the really creepy stuff and at times it’s uncomfortable to watch – he hides under Juliette’s bed, uses her toothbrush and even cracks one off in her bathtub. There’s a very small amount of backstory provided for him but unfortunately it’s not enough for us to understand his motivations – it would have been interesting to know what makes him tick. The tunnels and two-way mirror in the building have obviously been there for a while – who put them in and why? Perhaps a Blackbeard-esque room full of previous residents’ dead bodies would have added some zest to the proceedings.

Lee is totally wasted in the role of August, Max’s grandfather. Again, he could’ve been used to great effect for more creepy backstory, or even in some kind of head-of-a-pervert-family role. But alas, he disappears from the screen far too early.

The Resident might’ve been good 30 years ago, but today it looks tired and derivative. Not even a spirited performance from Morgan can save it from mediocrity. Shame.

Emma Wilkin