Faith Renewed!

All is right with the world, for The Skeleton Key has renewed my faith that Hollywood is still churning out stinkers.

The Skeleton Key (2005) is a “thriller/horror” film starring Kate Hudson and Peter Sarsgaard, who sports a terrible southern accent here. I first saw Kate Hudson in Almost Famous, and her mix of naivete and young maturity there made her irresistible. Since then, she has done nothing but crap. How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days was moderately entertaining as far as romantic movies go, but the rest of the Hudson oeuvre has been terrible. The Skeleton Key is no different, and I wonder why the producers decided that she was the best one for the role.

The problem with The Skeleton Key is not the acting, though, which is generally fine. It’s the mix of thriller and horror that just doesn’t work here. The back of the DVD compares the film to The Sixth Sense, and I knew it was going to be bad right then. When a film has to compare itself to some other great movie, it doesn’t have its own thing going for it. What made The Sixth Sense great was not just its originality but its truly horrifying sequences. Sure, there was drama and tenderness, but it was also really freaking scary. The Skeleton Key tries to do the same thing. It builds up the scares throughout the entire movie, making us anticipate that something really terrible is going to happen. Even these anticipatory scenes aren’t scary, though; they’re merely anticipating a scare that, well, never actually comes. The ending, which tries to present itself as a “switch” or “play” in The Sixth Sense vein, doesn’t even work. Here, we do know what’s coming, and it fails to be scary.

That I just can’t handle. The “thriller/horror” dichotomy doesn’t work anymore, and when a horror film isn’t scary, I’m distraught. I love horror films, and I am more scared of them as I get older, with scenes stuck in my head for weeks and years. If a horror film can’t even do that, trash it. The Skeleton Key has absolutely nothing going for it, except a moderately interesting plot. If it can’t scare me, it isn’t worth watching, though. The very title is a metaphor for the entire movie: a weak attempt to make it seem scary without really being scary. The title has something to do with the movie, yes, but it is not the key to it by any means. The producers simply thought it sounded good. Weak, boys, weak.

What I did like about this film is its racial plot. Blacks and whites intermingle here in a way that is different from any other film I have ever seen. The entire idea is only specifically mentioned once, at the end of the movie, but it’s there underneath the entire time, at least if we read the movie backwards, knowing what will happen at the end. Some of the plot takes on strange overtones if we see the characters as their “true” racial selves. Notice I didn’t say “racist,” although there’s some of that. I’m talking about a mixing of races that is truly original. I can’t really say more on this subject without giving away the twist at the end, but this one facet of the film brings it above a zero and makes it, well, not exactly worthwhile, but not a complete waste of time, either.

Grade for The Skeleton Key: 3