BRIEF VERDICT: The latest vehicle for bland-blonde starlet Kate Hudson is a disappointing, overcooked serving of old-school deep-south Gothic mumbo-
jumbo gumbo.


There are all sorts of (mostly predictable) twists and (mostly cheap) shocks along the way after pert 25-year-old Caroline Ellis (Hudson) is hired* to look after the dying stroke-victim Ben Devereaux (John Hurt) in the rambling Louisiana-bayou mansion he shares with his steel-magnolia wife Violet (Gena Rowlands). It doesn't take Caroline (or the audience) long to spot that something is amiss, and she confides her fears in smooth-talking lawyer Luke (Peter Sarsgaard). But who - if anyone - can be trusted?

Taking forever to get going (despite an absence of any kind of opening titles) The Skeleton Key plods along through the middle stretches as Caroline turns Nancy Drew to unpick the Old Dark Secrets of the Old Dark House. There are moments of prime ludicrousness along the way - you can see why, when shown to the London press, the picture was greeted with copious hilarity from the assembled journalists.

Laugh-out-loud moments include: a wildly overstylised flashback to a Great Gatsby-style houseparty which culminates in a fiery double lynching; Hudson 'exorcising' a spell that's supposedly kept Hurt immobile, the young thespian casually intoning her lines as if reading out a recipe from a cookbook; Hudson being caught listening to an ancient recording of a voodoo rite by her know-all best pal (Joy Bryant) and lying that the spooky old-timey incantatory chanting is "just a local band"; Rowlands drawling "Ah believe yew broke mah legs" during the frenzied climax - not the kind of line she got to deliver in any of her classic collaborations with husband John Cassavetes.

To be fair, that sturm-und-drang denouement does pack quite a punch - delivering quite a neat and refreshingly un-guessable final twist. But it's all too little too late - and, while the big "reveal" at the end seems pretty clever at the time, even a moment's reflection exposes holes gaping wider than a hungry 'gator's jaws.

How distressing to see top-drawer performers like Rowlands and Sarsgaard wasting their time on this kind of multiplex-fodder nonsense - not to mention poor Isaach de Bankole, restricted to one scene that, no doubt inadvertently, comes across as ever-so-slightly racist. And how depressingly typical of the whole ill-advised enterprise that, having gone to the trouble of casting Hurt - an actor with one of the world's great speaking voices - Softley and company confine him in a role which renders him almost entirely mute (and also places him in some distinctly undignified positions, as when Ben makes an unlikely rooftop escape attempt during a mini-monsoon).

In these days when every Hollywood production seems to be either a remake or a sequel, we should perhaps applaud every original screenplay which makes it into production. But there's very little in this script which is in any way original at all - instead Ehren Kruger seems content to tick off every last cockamamey cliche of the genre from kudzu-draped trees to rain-lashing electrical storms to that mysterious, forbidden locked room in the attic. A confusing voodoo (or is it "hoodoo"?) subplot and some picturesque New Orleans interludes, meanwhile, stir memories of Alan Parker's deliriously atmospheric guilty-pleasure Angel Heart - and the comparison certainly isn't to The Skeleton Key's advantage.

As Kruger was also the writer responsible for the breezily post-modern, self-referential Scream 3, one can only guess that all of this picture's belaboured, hackneyed shenanigans are quite deliberate and some kind of a straight-faced spoof. If so, it's unfortunate that director Softley doesn't seem to have been let in on the gag - he handles the pulpy material with much of the ponderous reverence he accorded to Henry James on 1997's The Wings of the Dove.

In the wake of Wings's success the British-born Softley presumably had his pick of projects - only to then come a right cropper when selecting what turned out to be the critical and box-office disappointment K-PAX. The outlook doesn't seem much brighter right now, however - because, far from opening all doors in Hollywood's corridors of power, the rusty, clunky Skeleton Key may prove a distinct hindrance to his further progress.

Neil Young
26th July 2005

THE SKELETON KEY : [4/10] : USA (US-Ger) 2004 : Iain SOFTLEY : 104 mins
seen at Odeon cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 26th July 2005 - press show

* British audiences may be puzzled by the scene in which Hudson's character spots and answers an ad for "hospice caretaker." In the US, this description means "carer to look after a dying person"; in the UK the phrase means "janitor for a hospice [ie care-facility dedicated to the terminally ill.]"

FURTHER READING : COLD CREEK MANOR ... THE DESCENT ... NIGHT OF THE DEMON