TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Bereamic Awesome Movie

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

birgit_schuette It was kindof predictable, but I liked it anyway. I liked the scenes, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan did an excellent job seeming both wholesome and kind in the beginning, and super creepy later. I had to LOL when he borrowed her toothbrush and licked her fingers in her sleep. Def major creepo factor! But funny. Give it a watch if you're just in the mood for a thriller.

Filipe Neto This film reminds me a little of "Panic Room" and other films that, mostly, happen inside a house and whose action focuses on the fear of intruders. These two elements are the axis of the plot, in which a newly single nurse has just moved into a new apartment, in a rental business that seems too good to be true: a spacious apartment in a central New York borough, for a surprisingly low price. And to make everything even more appealing, the owner of the apartment she is going to rent is an attractive bachelor who seems to be interested in her. As the Portuguese use to say, "when alms are too much, the poor distrust". When something seems too good, there is reason to suspect that something bad is hidden. After all, the landlord will prove to be a dangerous maniac, who spends his time spying his new tenant for holes in the walls. We've seen things like that before, haven't we? Its not difficult to imagine the course and conclusion of this plot, or is it? Well... the big problem with this movie is precisely that: from the moment the audience catches the plot's main theme, everything becomes too obvious and predictable. Worse than that is the fact that both, villain and heroine, are a little stupid in the things they do. I think characters were poorly thought out and poorly constructed.As for the cast, Hillary Swank is a consecrated actress with two Oscars on the living room shelf and Christopher Lee is equally respectable (though he doesn't have much to do here). Their talent isn't in question. Lee Pace is good enough for the small role he has in the film. In contrast, Jeffrey Dean Morgan seems to be a poor actor, and he seems to act like a counterfeit copy of Javier Bardem, looking to be like a Latin lover or a "wine bottle seducer". Too cliché, sorry.

Robert J. Maxwell Hillary Swank is a doctor at a New York hospital and I guess I don't have to tell YOU about the cost of living in New York. And the rents? A fortune for an apartment the size of a walk-in closet, unfurnished, no smoking, no drinking, no cussing, no nudity, no sexual congress, utilities extra, and no pets.Fortunately for Swank, she find a comfortable enough place at a more than reasonable price. And everything is included, including the peeping Tom, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who owns the place and has refitted it with a maze of peep holes, crawlspaces cameras, microphones, and other preverted appurtenances and paraphernalia.Strange things happen while Swank occupies the place. Windows slam shut without warning and there is a big BOOM on the sound track. (This is called a "sting" in the industry.) As it happens, there is no particular reason for the window to slam shut without warning. I mean, it has nothing to do with Jeffrey Dean Morgan. It's just there to provide the unthinking viewer with a jolt of sympathetic arousal.This creeping around, the tentative encounters between the sinuous Swank and the bland but twitterpated Morgan, take up the bulk of the movie. The recently deceased Christopher Lee is in the cast too, in excelsis. He's a taciturn old codger, an actor whom age has turned into a magnificent wreck, flung "on the reef of Norman's Woe." He's not around long. Morgan is his grandson, and Morgan kills him.The acting is alright but I couldn't help disliking Jeffrey Dean Morgan. It's not his creepiness that was so bothersome. Hell, who wouldn't want to sneak into the slinky Swank's bedroom in the middle of the night and suck on her little finger while she slept? Any normal man would crawl at the chance. No, it's not his paraphilia. It's his three names. This current fad of actors and actresses needing three names has got to stop. It's the hoof and mouth disease of modern celebrity. And while we're at it, let's have no more girls named "Dakota" either. Enough is enough.The direction is desperate. I have no idea what was going through Antti Jokinen's mind when, in the very middle of this narrative, he runs the film backwards in black and white at blinding speed and starts over from the beginning. Maybe it wasn't in his mind. Maybe it was something in his digestive system.But his greatest sin is the non-disrobing of Hillary Swank. Oh, she's not always clothed. It's worse than that. She does remove her clothes and even makes love to her ex husband once -- but the director never ONCE gives us a display of gratuitous nudity. When she's traipsing around naked, all you see are her feet. Even when she's taking a bath in a fluid so opaque that it suggests ass's milk and has resorted to DIY, you'd have to have second sight to realize what was going on. And at that, there's a click or some other odd sound from somewhere, and she's subject to masturbationem interruptus. It's okay if the viewer doesn't get off, but must the director leave silky Swank hanging too?No, it won't do. Swank is too sensuous to be hidden from view. God, those glistening white choppers. What an overbite! She could gnaw her way through an iron bolt as easily as you or I could handle a corn cob at an Iowa picnic.Back to the drawing board, Antti. And change that name.

joe-pearce-1 Usually, I don't bother reviewing something I dislike, preferring to congratulate achievement rather than to condemn ineptitude. But ineptitude runs rampant here, especially given the talent. I've rated it 2 because if nothing else (and there is nothing else), it does have some very fine camera-work and effective enough music. The problem is that there is really no story in this film. From the time Swank takes her $3,800 Brooklyn apartment, we know she's in some kind of danger. From 15 minutes later on, we know exactly what that danger consists of, and who poses it to her. After that, it is nothing but a long series of voyeuristic observations and meanderings through keyholes, panels, drains - you name it, it works for observability - and that's it. We never learn anything about any of the characters beyond what they do for a living and why Swank has left her husband. We never learn anything about what made the madman who owns the building into a madman. We never learn anything about his grandfather, who brought him up, except that Gramps doesn't seem to like him too much. When Madman Landlord knocks off Grandpa, we have no idea why he does so, nor what he does for the rest of the story with the body. When Swank, in mortal danger (mostly of understanding the plot) hardly registers the sight of her dead husband literally hanging around, it's hard to believe that she ever loved him, let alone still does. Swank is shown as an apparently important doctor at her hospital, yet she seems to just drop in and out of it at will, and go directly from heroically saving lives to complaining to a colleague about her married life. Worse, and this is really worse, from the time she enters the new apartment for the first time, about 85% of the rest of the film takes place in that apartment, yet the viewer has absolutely no idea what that apartment looks like. Despite the fact that she and her separated husband seem truly astonished that she can find such a wonderful and large apartment for $3,800 a month, to me (a Brooklyn resident), it looks like little more than a dilapidated and pretty small apartment, possessing nothing to sell it except a couple of window views of the outer world. The camera work is so intensely close up and restrictive that one never gets any sense of proportion as to what the total apartment looks like, one room from another, the true size of the place, what room leads to the next, etc., etc. There is not one regularly lighted scene at any time in the apartment. Does Swank not have light bulbs or something with which to open the curtains on her windows? All is murk! When the final, rather gargantuan battle between Swank and Morgan arrives (it's like a knives, axes, needles and staple gun version of the great fight in 1952's SCARAMOUCHE, but even the candlelit opera house that one takes place in has a hundred times the visual clarity of anything seen in RESIDENT, but at least this is where the excellent camera-work mostly comes in), most of the time I can't keep track of where they are fighting it or where Swank is headed, so little definition has been given to either the apartment or the rest of the building up to that point. All the outdoor scenes (little more than for Swank's jogging moments) are filmed on location in Brooklyn, but all the interiors seem to have been filmed in New Mexico - and in a rather minuscule part of New Mexico at that - like a darkened sound stage. Given that such excellent actors as Swank, Morgan, Lee and Pace have nothing to act except (in order) hysteria, madness, old age and blandness, it's no wonder they can't register much, especially as the screenplay is of no help to anybody and the storyline remains almost totally without background. I actually felt cheated to see two-time Academy Award winner Swank in such a mishmash (and she's responsible for it, since she produced it; are good roles that hard to find with two Oscars on the shelf?), and to see Christopher Lee's name added to the cast obviously to sell the film to people like myself, since he doesn't have ten lines to speak in the entire film and cannot be on the screen for a grand total of more than about three minutes. It's the kind of film that asks the question, Why was this made?, and then proceeds not to be able to answer it.