The Skeleton Key (2005)

The greatest movie ever!

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

This film is a good watch and makes me happy to see however is not that spooky, creepy or scary. This movie does include Hoodoo which is a rather original thing to see in a horror film which is good about this film. It does seem to drag on however but overall is a decent watch.

This film has been brought up a lot in the last week - often as a vector of 'unoriginal!' attack by people with some sort of political gripe with Get Out - and so I figured it was worth revisiting. While there are some passing similarities to Get Out in the general Tales From the Crypt-like plot devices, The Skeleton Key doens't have any of the subtext, any of the sociopolitical commentary, or any of the sparkling dialogue that made the newer film a critically-beloved bit of genre filmmaking. This is a decently-shot and fairly shallow experience that reminded me of how bad the jump scares were in the last decade - it's a tedious parade of unearned false startles that completely undermine the first hour of the film - and the competent conclusion doesn't quite redeem it.

Overall, this movie was good but nothing special. We've seen the narrative a hundred times. Young woman enters strange premises, strange things happen, young woman heroically investigates everything culminating in action and the supernatural. Now let's take a look at the ending.Was I expecting something better? Sometimes yes. I already guessed Hudson would be the victim, but I was also hoping all this hoodoo/voodoo nonsense was something to mess with her head to distract her from some very practical sinister evil. Scratch that. Hoodoo is real.Given that this was so far a generic horror/suspense, I was expecting Hudson to emerge victorious. The real ending is a bit better. It was more realistic. A girl from the north snooping around against her better judgment to leave and jumping at every hint of hoodoo tid- bit as 'evidence' when she in fact does not know anything about it is probably going to fail miserably. Kudos to the film for that.But what about the revelation that the perpetrators were Justify and his wife all along? That adds an element of disturbing to this flick like nothing else. Essentially the bankers lynched their own children. Is that making a statement about how it was foolish of them to resort to violence when they didn't know what they were up against? If so, that's highly objectionable. And the viewer is left with the sudden revelation that Justify and his wife were evil all along. Why is there nothing else in the movie hinting toward this? What was the point of telling us the black servants were mistreated? Would they have spared the banker's children if they weren't? They don't seem to have any qualms left about hijacking innocent women. Voodoo aside, its hard to believe they are just evil to the point of being psychopaths in that they are completely disinterested in whether their victims deserve this kind of end.

The insipid Kate Hudson (Goldie Hawn's daughter) stars in this half-baked slice of Southern Gothic as a nurse who winds up at a creepy and run-down old plantation to care for a seriously disabled man. Her job goes well at first, but she soon begins to ask questions about her controlling employer (the man's wife) as well as the secrets hidden in the locked attic.And so we have THE SKELETON KEY, which effectively manages some atmospheric moments but spoils them with barely-decent writing in which everything is forced to play out to its predictable climax. In that respect it's a little like WHAT LIES BENEATH, an equally play-it-safe thriller that seems to have been aimed at bored housewives more than anything else.The inclusion in the plot of themes of voodoo and immortality is interesting, but the execution is only so-so. It doesn't help that the cast is weak; Hudson is boring, Peter Sarsgaard is weak, and only Gena Rowlands seems to be channelling the Bette Davis spirit of old. John Hurt is the best actor here, but he's pretty much wasted in a role where he's given very little to do. THE SKELETON KEY deserves commendation for trying something different, but in the end there's not much here.