By Simon Thompson
Writer/director Matt McClung’s Inhabitants is a viewing experience akin to looking at a half assembled ornate coffee table. Shoddily scripted and poorly paced, making a roughly hour and forty five minute running time feel like The Human Condition trilogy being played on half speed- Inhabitants is a movie which is not only predictable and obvious but meanders more than a Proust paragraph to get to its main plot points.
Olivia, (Anna Jacoby Heron) and Francis (Josh Andres Rivera) are a young couple who have just moved in together. Francis is a lapsed catholic haunted by a childhood of guilt and dogma, while Olivia is more of a new age hippy dippy type. To cut a long story short, it turns out that the couple are being haunted by the ghost of Francis’ childhood youth minister who disapproves of the couple’s ways and decides to punish them from beyond the grave.
To start with Heron and Rivera completely lack any chemistry, which is a huge negative when I’m supposed to believe in them as a couple who are very much in love. The dialogue between the two main characters is pedestrian and dull, at times feeling less like I was watching a horror movie with tension and high stakes and more like footage of the world’s blandest Ideal Homes cover models painting a fence.
The haunting and religious obscurantism elements of the plot are reheated leftovers from numerous classic horror movies (Rosemary’s Baby, The Wicker Man, Carrie, Dark Water, The Fog, The Sixth Sense the list goes on to be honest) that McClung does nothing new or interesting with.
The camera work, to McClung’s credit, is easily the best part of this movie. McClung shows his technical filmmaking skills and knack for set up most notably during the film’s intro sequence where Olivia hears a noise at the window in their new home, stoking the audience’s fears right up, only for it turn out to be something innocuous.
The only other bright spot I can think of is Kevin Nealon (who probably cost half the budget just to appear) as the proprietor of a new age shop that Olivia visits. Sadly Kevin Nealon’s bizarre casting is not enough to save Inhabitants, but it probably will win the movie that all important and sizeable demographic of diehard 90s SNL afficionados.
Overall, Inhabitants is a turgid waste of time which completely fails to live up to its promising introduction sequence. The biggest cardinal sin that this movie commits, above all else, is that it isn’t even laughable enough for me to recommend in a so bad it’s good way .
The Inhabitants is available on digital 26 January from Miracle Media.
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