A rotund Alfred Molina stars in THE LODGER (opening in limited release this Friday ahead of its DVDebut February 10 from Sony Pictures) as Detective Chandler Manning, who’s got a wife in a mental ward, a daughter on the outs and residual guilt from his investigation of a series of murders years before, for which he suspects the wrong man was executed. Manning’s fears are realized when a new spate of killings begin in Hollywood, and like the earlier set, they follow the pattern of the original Jack the Ripper murders.
Meanwhile, housewife Ellen Bunting (Hope Davis) rents her dark guest house to a mysterious stranger (LAND OF THE DEAD’s Simon Baker), who gives off every warning sign possible that he is up to no good. He demands that neither Ellen nor her husband (Donal Logue) disturb his privacy, even as he comes and goes in the dead of night.Well, that’s 90 minutes of my life I’ll never get back. The LODGER, very loosely based on a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes that has been filmed three times before (in 1927 by Alfred Hitchcock—the Master’s third film—and then again in 1932 and definitively in 1944), somehow takes an interesting concept and what should be a solid cast and wastes both. Director/screenwriter David Ondaatje has liberally altered much of the book’s storyline, pointlessly updating it to the present and employing as many visual clichés as he can in the process. But he should have paid more attention to his script, which becomes increasingly confusing and careless as the show goes on.
There’s plenty here that doesn’t make sense, starting with the setting: I’m not sure which Los Angeles Ondaatje is working in, but his film takes place in one where it rains all the time. This is also a Los Angeles where houses mysteriously move themselves: in one climactic sequence, Molina leaps into the car outside a suspect’s house and races to save someone from being murdered. He stops the attack and pursues the attacker down an alley—only to end up at the same house he drove away from! Meanwhile, Ondaatje somehow contrives to turn suspicion for the killings on Manning himself (with lots of histrionics from a frail-looking Philip Baker Hall as his police captain), yet even after he’s suspended from the force, our hero is still somehow allowed to visit crime scenes.
Beyond those lapses, Ondaatje trots out a numbing parade of shopworn visual tricks—sped-up time-lapse footage of cars on the highway, inexplicable slow motion—over and over again like he’s helplessly transfixed by them for the first time. Perhaps he’s trying to make up for the fact that he’s got no other discernible visual style—much of the picture and lighting has the flat look of a TV movie, and the director transitions from scene to scene with no dynamic punch or rhythm.
If I had to scrape up something positive to say, I could admit that I found Shane West’s rookie cop somewhat likable and appreciated Molina’s attempt to invest a modicum of empathy in his unwieldy character. There’s also one killing—where we see the victim’s head and shoulders through a space in a fence while unspeakable things are done to her out of view—that’s strikingly shot. Other than that, however, THE LODGER comes close to being unwatchable. Sadly, this one’s not even a rental.
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