The Resident, review
Hilary Swank's hottie landlord smiles all too readily in this sleek hammer horror. Rating:
Dir: Antti Jokinen; starring: Hilary Swank, Jeffrey Dean Moran, Lee Pace. 15 cert, 91 min
As a throwback to an earlier, sillier age of home-invasion thrillers – shades of Pacific Heights and Single White Female – it’s fitting that this sleek trash comes with the production stamp of Hammer Films, even throwing a cameo to a sadly-underused Christopher Lee. Hilary Swank plays a New York medic whose palatial new flat rental looks too good to be true, because it is: her hottie landlord (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) smiles all too readily to be anything other than a pathologically jealous psycho stalker. Before the nailgun comes out, the inventive, through-the-keyhole cinematography of Guillermo (Pan’s Labyrinth) Navarro keeps you amused, but actual scares (let alone surprises) are in short supply.
