Vacancy.

"With no zombies, Asian ghost children or clattering symbols of post-9/11 uncertainty, Vacancy feels remarkably pure, almost naive, in its thrill seeking," writes Tim Grierson in the LA Weekly. "As a rebuke to so many horror films, where the terrorizing element springs from some sociological or personal demon, the motel's mask-wearing, knife-wielding psychopaths are blessedly free of subtext, which makes David and Amy's predicament all the more arbitrary and therefore traumatizing.... Happily, the movie is exactly what you think it's going to be, only better."

Updated through 4/22.

"At first glance, Vacancy seems to be the latest entry in the lamentable 'torture porn' genre, whose films mainly involve waiting for the next vaguely sympathetic character to have his or her vital organs pulled out with a fork," writes Sam Adams in the Los Angeles Times. "But director Nimród Antal and writer Mark L Smith are up to something a bit cannier as well as more devious."

"Vacancy runs a very brief 80-odd minutes, but uses its time wisely," writes Ryan Stewart at Cinematical.

But for the New York Times' Manohla Dargis, it's little more than a "banal horror retread."

More from Nick Schager in Slant and Eric Kohn, who interviews Antal for the New York Press.

Update, 4/22: Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times: "[T]he spying that's bothering us in recent films seems to have more to do with the sort of ad hoc, vigilante monitoring we subject one another to than any kind of organized, institutional effort. What concerns them is not Big Brother but the ways in which we've internalized voyeurism, prurience, violence, schadenfreude and self-policing. The fear these new films are expressing is a fear of the spy we know, the person in the next room, at the desk beside us, in the same bed. The fear of the spies we are becoming." Films touched on besides Vacancy: Red Road, Disturbia, Alone With Her, The Lives of Others, Caché and, harking back, The Conversation and Blow Out.

Posted by dwhudson at April 20, 2007 4:06 PM