The Resident

2011

A young female doctor, newly sprung from a live-in relationship and needing a her own place to live, lucks into what seems like the best deal in New York City: an enormous apartment with a great view and a low price tag. The pot is sweetened further by the fact that the landlord is handsome, charming, and single. What could go wrong?

Plenty for her, and plenty for the film as well.

The film started off well. The script went to the trouble of establishing multiple possible explanations for the strange goings-on in the old apartment, while keeping us at first within the protagonist's POV. Is the grandpa as creepy as he seems? Is the landlord not what he appears? Or is the doctor simply paranoid about the very predictable failings of an old building? It could have been an intriguing puzzle, but the director almost immediately eliminated one of those three possibilities with spooky and ham-fisted foreshadowing. The eerie music and the meaningful glances told us that something was amiss. Then the screenwriter yanked us out of the doctor's point of view, switched to omniscient narration and turned over all the cards, thus eliminating another of the possibilities.

The film employs an odd narrative structure. Although it is ostensibly a mystery/thriller, it reveals all the secrets and draws back all the curtains after only 30 minutes of running time, leaving a few thrills in the remaining hour, but no mystery of any kind. You know how the Wild Things movies always end with the whodunit being explained by revealing a series of previous actions or schemes we had not been aware of? Well, this film did exactly that, the ol' Wild Things revelation technique, except that it did that at the 1/3 mark! After that first third of the film, the viewer knows everything that had formerly been out of sight, and can guess exactly what will happen from then on. The only part of the narrative which remains unresolved is how long it will take the protagonist to find out what we already know. That's kind of a shame because this might have been a nifty little thriller if it could have kept its hole cards down.

This is a neo-Hammer film, part of that legendary studio's attempt at a revival, and you know that they could have developed some atmosphere because, in a nod to Hammer's storied past, the landlord's creepy old grandpa is played by the studio's all-time greatest star, Christopher Lee. Unfortunately, the film turns out to be disappointing and more than a little annoying.

If you choose to watch this film, I suspect your mind will be occupied primarily with two questions: (1) How did Hammer get Hillary Swank, two-time winner of the Best Actress Oscar, into a movie which could have been made by the same studio in the 1970s, and if it had been, would have played the drive-in circuit?; (2) How did they get the same muscular Ms. Swank to reveal that impressively toned body, especially since the nude scenes can't be justified by the artistic merit of this project? It's not like Swank habitually doffs her duds on screen, ala Kate Winslet. This is new territory for her. And it's not like she's doing it for an Oscar, ala Halle Berry. This nudity was strictly for audience titillation. If Swank has to take a role like this in the first place, and take her clothes off as well in the process, it doesn't seem that she's getting the respect I would presume to be accorded to multiple Oscar winners. Kate Hepburn was about Swank's age after she won her Oscar for The Philadelphia Story, and I don't remember her suddenly switching to cheapjack thrillers. Frankly, I'm mystified by Swank's willingness to take this role.

Not that I mind the nudity, of course. I might be mystified about why she would appear in an exploitation film, but I'm also impressed by her credentials. The Swankstress has a spectacular figure.

Here are two different HD versions of Swank's scenes. One is 720, the other 1080.