Kate Hudson stars as Caroline Ellis, a hospice worker in New
Orleans who gets fed up with the institutionalized mentality of her job and
applies for a position as a private nurse for the Devereaux family, an elderly,
childless couple who live out in the bayou. The husband, Ben (John Hurt)
suffered a massive stroke on both sides of his body, making him paralyzed and
bedridden. Caroline jumps at the job, despite the initial misgivings of Violet
(Gena Rowlands), Ben's overprotective wife, who feels that Caroline--who is
originally from New Jersey--is an outsider who "won't understand the house." But
seeing a chance to finally care for a patient on her own terms, Caroline slowly
wins over Violet with her kind and gentle manner with Ben, which even includes
washing him.
For her part, Caroline begins to notice some strange things in the sprawling
mansion, which was once a southern plantation. For one thing, all of the mirrors
in the house are gone--even from the bathroom walls. And when she's up in the
attic one day, Caroline hears some strange sounds coming from behind a locked
door--which itself is strange, because Violet gave her a special skeleton key
that opens the doors in all thirty rooms of the mansion, and yet it won't give
her access to this strange room. The plot thickens even more when the supposedly
bedridden Ben not only leaves his bed, but also manages to leave his room by
crawling out on the porch roof. In her haste to retrieve the wheelchair for Ben,
Caroline notices a bed sheet in Ben's room on which he scrawled two words in
dirt: help me.
Skeleton Key is the sort of creepy supernatural thriller that recalls The
Innocents with the inherent creepiness of The Ring--which should come as no
surprise to horror film buffs, because Ehren Kruger, who wrote that eerie remake,
also did the literate script for this film. Director Iain Softley does a
marvelous job in slowly building up the suspense, while effectively capturing
the unique atmosphere of the New Orleans bayou region and the practice of hoodoo.
Unlike Voodoo, which is a benign religion, hoodoo is a mixture of various
magical practices, some of which--as Caroline finds out the hard way--can be
used for malevolent purposes. Kate Hudson is superb as Caroline, a plucky
heroine who doesn't come off as a lame-brained Nancy Drew clone. The motives
for her actions are clear and fleshed out very well by the script, as well as
Hudson's subtle performance.
The always-great Gena Rowlands truly shines in her
part as Violet, and John Hurt does wonders in a part that gives him very little
lines. Joy Bryant is also very good as Caroline's friend Jill, who is the voice
of reason in the film. The special features include a series of fascinating,
too-short making of features that not only looks at the film's production, but
also what it's like to shoot a film in New Orleans (Skeleton Key was shot before
Hurricane Katrina hit the city in fall 2005) and the outlying bayou region.
There's also a look at the music of that area, and even a fun segment on how to
make gumbo. But my favorite part of the making of features is a short section
where Kate Hudson talks about a real-like brush with the supernatural that she
experienced when she was a girl. It's actually a spooky, and very funny, story
thanks to the manner in which Hudson tells it. And Gena Rowlands reads how to make
a love spell, while John Hurt reads a powerful excerpt from the book "Voices From
Slavery." If Skeleton Key seems like a creaky old story that's better suited for
the Lifetime Network, think again. This is a very well done horror movie with a
dark twist that will make you believe in its Southern gothic terrors.
--SF
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