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Film review

Hoodoo whodunnit

In The Skeleton Key, typical ingredients (eerie sounds, a Louisiana setting) create a bland mystery that eventually manages to conjure up a few surprises.

By STEVE PERSALL
Published August 11, 2005

	[Photo: Universal Studios
	Caroline (Kate Hudson), a hospice nurse, unlocks a mystery in her new patient’s gloomy old mansion in The Skeleton Key.

Louisiana's bayou backdrops and supernatural traditions can't entirely disguise the fact that The Skeleton Key is an ordinary haunted house yarn. Take away the moss-draped trees and hoodoo machinations, and this could easily be Amityville again, a prospect scarier than anything director Iain Softley puts on screen.

This time, Kate Hudson is the movie star assigned to wander through dark places and play Nancy Drew games while strange things occur. It's a thankless job, and one we didn't expect after Hudson's stellar debut in 2000's Almost Famous. After a string of flops, only Hudson's family tie to Goldie Hawn keeps that movie's title from being thoroughly ironic.

Hudson plays Caroline Ellis, a hospice caretaker literally closing the book on a patient when the film begins. She's disillusioned by the facility's indifference to death, enough to apply for an in-home position at the Devereaux estate in the swamps outside New Orleans. Ben Devereaux (John Hurt) has suffered an apparent stroke, and his wife, Violet (Gena Rowlands), isn't keen on a stranger taking care of her man.

Caroline gets the job, though, and immediately starts snooping at the first eerie sounds in the attic. The skeleton key Violet gave her for complete access doesn't open one door, so she must find a way. A previous encounter with chicken-bone mobiles and brick dust that lines a threshold hasn't clued her in to the region's hoodoo heritage. Otherwise, she might leave well enough alone.

What am I saying? Of course she would still enter the room and disturb the contents, paving the way to more occult practices and eventually to a morbid reason for the house's haunting. The Skeleton Key is yet another horror movie that would be a short subject if anyone behaved in a sensible, ordinary way.

Yet it's also one of those seldom-seen horror flicks that gets better in the homestretch, when the familiar jolts require explanations. Not great, but better. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger displays above-average research of hoodoo - like the more commonly invoked (for entertainment's sake, at least) voodoo, a derivative of African folk religion imported by slaves. Whether hoodoo makes the script's head-scratching final twist possible is debatable, but in the last reel we're primed to believe just about anything.

Nothing about Hudson's role is a challenge. For a better time, check out Rowlands' nicely measured portrayal of a wilted Southern flower. Violet never "jumps the couch," to use a current description of crazy inspired by Tom Cruise's appearance on Oprah. Instead, Rowlands plays Violet's motivations fairly close to the vest, keeping tension at a passable level.

Peter Sarsgaard takes a break from ascending to the forefront of American actors by playing Luke Marshall, a lawyer handling the Devereaux estate. This is the role Kruger neglected to make ambiguous. Luke is too helpful to be sincere, then too strange to be believed until the screenplay explains his actions. That doesn't erase how silly he looked a few minutes earlier.

The Skeleton Key eventually offers a couple of nifty nightmare sequences and a Twilight Zone finale that probably makes sense if you think about it. Whether the movie deserves that effort after so many cliches and phony shocks is a matter of personal taste.

Grade: C

Director: Iain Softley

Cast: Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, John Hurt, Peter Sarsgaard, Joy Bryant, Ronald McCall, Maxine Barnett

Screenplay: Ehren Kruger

Rating: PG-13; violence, disturbing images, partial nudity, mature themes

Running time: 104 min.

[Last modified August 10, 2005, 13:50:09]