Skeleton Key

Year: 2005

Grade: C

Country: USA

Director: Softley

Review

about as good as i expected it to be. i don’t really like kate hudson, but i’m not entirely sure why. she doesn’t strike me as particularly appalling in her interviews – clearly she’s not someone i would befriend, but she’s not vile either. sure, i dislike goldie hawn (her mom), but i don’t dislike kurt russell (her dad), so that’s a wash. she was in almost famous, which i thought was overrated, but i’ve never seen any of her other films. for some reason i just find that i’m reticent to watch her films. perhaps it’s a combination of the fact that she chooses “chick flicks” and her mom’s sort of a bimbo and the one movie i’ve seen her in sucked and she’s married to a third rate musician. anyway, she’s decent enough in this film.

though slowly paced at first, the pacing is decent enough overall. i felt that the slowness of the first 30 minutes could have been used to flesh out hudson’s character a bit. instead softley chose to lay some rudimentary plot groundwork and establish normalcy. unfortunately this means hudson’s character is just another archetype cut from the same fabric as most movie characters. ho hum. some of softley’s artistic touches (the zoom revealing the brick dust at the base of the door near the end, the shaking objects effect, etc.) didn’t quite work for me.

the ending was probably the best part of the film. it surprised me, wasn’t too out of the blue and can’t be considered a “happy ending.”