Vacancy (2007)

Movie: Vacancy (2007), directed by Nimród Antal

Watched on: STARZ

Ran: 7.61 miles, 9’17”/mile, 01:10:37 (careful recovery run)

 

Hey, so I have access to STARZ again! I mean, I never stopped having access to STARZ on cable (yes, I have cable; I’m old, we’ve established that), but at some point recently when I tried to sign into the STARZ app on my Apple TV, it said “sorry, your cable provider no longer includes access to this app; please contact them to complain.” I, however, being temperamentally—if not ethnically—British, instead harrumphed disapprovingly to myself and stewed silently in the injustice of it all.

 

I did, however, try signing in once a week or so, just to see if the situation improved, and suddenly it did! And that’s how I came to watch Vacancy, a movie I hadn’t seen since it first hit premium cable a dozen or so years ago. What can I say? After the fiercely indie weirdness of Lace Crater, I was in the mood for something aggressively Hollywood as a palate cleanser, and on that front, Vacancy does not disappoint.

 

Vacancy, for the uninitiated, is about Amy and David, a couple in the throes of the divorce process. They’re road-tripping back from Amy’s parents’ anniversary celebration when David swerves hard to avoid a raccoon in the road and subsequently winds up lost in the middle of nowhere at 1 AM and now the engine is making some very troubling sounds. They make it to a repair shop which seems to exist thirty miles from anything except for a totally unsuspicious and 100%-un-Bates-like motel that happens to be situated right next to it. The friendly mechanic is leaving for the night, but checks under the hood and assures the unhappy couple that they’ll easily make it to the next town… where, y’know, a real mechanic will be able to help them.

 

To the surprise of literally no one watching, the car dies completely about a mile or two down the road, and David and Amy have no choice but to hoof it back to the motel and rent a room for the night, since the mechanic won’t be back until morning. So they get their room key from the not-at-all-Norman-Bates-like proprietor (who was apparently watching torture porn in the back room when they entered—always a good sign), head to Room 4, and try to settle in for a relaxing wee-hours session of passive-aggressive bickering. 

 

But even though they’re the only guests in the motel, someone’s banging on their door and walls. Not-Norman-Bates isn’t being much help about that, so it’s not long before David tries to unwind by watching some of the unlabeled videotapes on top of the room’s VCR, only to discover that all of them are multi-camera security footage of guests being tortured and killed in a motel room. THIS room. The one in which Amy and David are currently experiencing a slow, sinking feeling after finding cameras hidden in the walls and vents.

 

So yeah, the rest of the movie involves David and Amy fighting for their lives while Not-Norman and a couple of masked attackers try to make them the stars of their next snuff film. From there on out it’s a pretty by-the-numbers action thriller comprising clever gambits, plenty of near-misses, and multiple deaths in what are intended to be nail-biting circumstances, but don’t worry, because—and I cannot stress this enough—the raccoon is totally fine.

 

You may well have guessed that this film owes rather a large debt of inspiration to Hitchcock in general and Psycho in particular, which is clear right away from the style of the animated opening credits and the Bernard Herrmannesque score. Don’t get me wrong—Vacancy is no Psycho. It’s a reasonably effective piece of work overall, with a good premise and a decent build-up of tension in the first acts (Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale are almost too believable as a couple on the outs—apparently they had real problems with each other on set, and it works for them), but once it turns into an overt fight for survival, Vacancy lacks the tautness and pacing of a Hitchcock movie, and most of that tension is lost.

 

Still, “It’s Not as Good as Hitchcock” is hardly a scathing criticism, and Vacancy is an enjoyable thrill ride that I don’t regret taking a second time. It’s true that the line between horror and thriller is often super-fuzzy, and some might argue that Vacancy shouldn’t be counted as a horror film at all; there’s not much gore, the body count is low, and the ending is very Hollywood. But in my book, it gets the nod for precisely one horrifying moment: the moment when David and Amy are watching what they think are low-budget horror movies and it slowly dawns on them that they’re watching real guests being real-murdered in their real motel room. It’s only a moment… but what a moment. Check it out, and give credit where credit’s due.