Vacancy

It is a collection of thriller cliches: conveniently out of service cell phones, deserted roads, a car that breaks down in the middle of nowhere and a creepy dark room. Despite those bound-to-make-any-film-predictable elements, however, Vacancy proves itself to be surprisingly, well, thrilling.

The story starts with Amy (Kate Beckinsale) and David Fox (Luke Wilson), an unhappily married couple driving through an alternate road. After the car breaks down, the arguing twosome is forced into spending the night at the only establishment reachable; a dirty motel where they are the only guests. Minutes after getting in their room, they find they are being watched through hidden cameras and soon they will, like previous guests, be attacked and killed. The story unfolds as an attempt to escape.

Hungarian director Nimrod Antal makes the story a mixture of Hitchcock's Pyscho and Saw - classic elements combined with twisted minds of new age psychos. There's no depth to it. It is a cat and mouse race throughout the entire 80 minutes of action. The characters don't develop into anything more than what you learn about them in the first moments of the film. No background is given about the main characters nor the killer. Beckinsale's and Wilson's roles are convincing as the average people on the verge of divorce and the photography adds a lot to the mood of the film, making it tense and claustrophobic throughout.

Vacancy is a unique film of its genre in the past 10 years because it goes back to the basics. It doesn't waste time explaining the whys of killers' actions. Like the memorable villains in Halloween or Friday the 13th, the killer is just evil. Period. It doesn't have a deep story, it won't win any academy awards and its ending is predictable before anyone even sees its trailer. It is still a great scary movie though, being a thriller meant to fulfill its one and only purpose: to thrill its audience, and it successfully does so.