The Resident

It’s certainly not difficult to see why The Resident is premiering on home video in North America, as the movie ultimately comes off as a low-rent, hopelessly by-the-numbers thriller that is way, way beneath the talents of its Oscar winning star. The film follows Hilary Swank’s Juliet Devereau as she moves into a spacious Brooklyn loft and quickly finds herself the target of a mysterious stalker, with the narrative offering up three suspects: Max (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Juliet’s friendly, bearded landlord; August (Christopher Lee), Max’s creepy grandfather; and Jack (Lee Pace), Juliet’s persistent ex-boyfriend. Director Antti Jokinen, working from a script cowritten with Robert Orr, initially does a nice job of establishing and perpetuating the movie’s ominous atmosphere, as the filmmaker peppers the proceedings with a number of appropriately sinister touches (eg what’s that weird look between Max and August?) The mysterious vibe persists right up until the half hour mark, at which point Jokinen literally rewinds the movie and shows the viewer exactly what the villain has been up to. It’s a fascinating sequence that ultimately stands as the high point of The Resident, as the film subsequently segues into a fairly (and disappointingly) standard woman-and-her-stalker-type thriller – although, to be fair, Jokinen offers up a handful of twists that, when coupled with Swank’s expectedly strong performance, prove effective at sustaining the viewer’s interest through the movie’s weaker stretches. There’s little doubt, however, that the film’s tenuously engaging atmosphere reaches its breaking point with the laughably conventional cat-and-mouse finale, with the eye-rolling silliness of this portion (eg the villain suddenly pops up after he’s seemingly been killed) ensuring that The Resident concludes on as underwhelming a note as one could possibly envision. The end result is an uneven yet watchable bit of trashy filmmaking, with Swank’s mere presence here nothing less than an epic head-scratcher.

**1/2 out of ****