I really wanted to like The Innkeepers.  I’ve appreciated the Ti West horror that I’ve watched and Sara Paxton has a compelling screen presence.  The setting of a hotel that’s about to be shut down is a good set-up, and although the ghost story is somewhat conventional, it’s workable.  Part of the problem was clearly lighting.  Maybe I’m just too old, but when something important takes place in a scene that’s just too dark, well, it loses something.  So here’s how it goes: Claire and Luke are at the front desk for the final weekend of The Yankee Pedlar.  The guests are a woman and her young son, a psychic who used to be a television star, and an old man who wants to stay in the room where he had his honeymoon.  Claire and Luke are also ghost hunting at the hotel and a suicide-bride ghost is said to haunt the property.  When Claire finally does see the ghost, after the old man dies by suicide in the same room as the bride, Claire ends up in the basement where they get her.

The chase through the basement is dark.  I didn’t realize, until reading a summary later, that Claire, who uses an inhaler throughout the movie, died of an asthma attack.  That gives the story a nice ambiguity.  I, for one, couldn’t see that because things just weren’t lit well enough.  The final sequence, before the credits, shows the room in which the psychic was staying (she had a tendency to gaze out the window) and then the door slams on the camera.  The summary said a very light image of Claire is visible, and that she turns toward the camera before the door slams.  I watched the ending twice and couldn’t see her anywhere.  That scene was too brightly lit.  Without those two bits, the ending really doesn’t make much sense.

Movies generally involve many, many people (thus the very long credits).  Although the director is the “conductor” of the piece, sometimes I wonder about the lighting decisions, and whether this was a lighting department decision or West’s.  Whoever it was, I’m sorry to say that it made my experience of seeing the movie a confusing one.  The movie did reasonably well against budget so I suspect plenty of people saw what I could not.  I would be willing to try it again, maybe in a darker room or on a bigger screen.  A ghost story where you can actually see the ghost seems like a winning combination for an October weekend.