The Innkeepers (2012)

Ti West's The Innkeepers is a supernatural horror film about the last days of a decaying Connecticut inn and the two employees who hunt its ghosts. Sara Paxton plays Claire, an asthmatic college dropout, and Pat Healy plays Luke, her fellow believer. The film is patient, atmospheric, and entirely content to be a genre exercise. Its cultural ambitions are minimal. The cast is overwhelmingly white, with a brief Lena Dunham appearance as a barista that does nothing to broaden the ensemble. Claire is a woman at the center of the story, but the screenplay offers no gendered argument, no critique of power, and no interest in turning her plight into a statement. The haunting is a haunting.

Race never enters the frame. The ghosts and the living are presented without racial context, and the film has no interest in historical memory or social commentary. LGBTQ themes are absent. Climate concerns are absent. Body image and self-acceptance are absent. Claire's asthma is a plot mechanism that leads to her death, not a portrait of neurodivergence or mental health advocacy. The inn's impending closure provides a melancholy backdrop, but the film does not use it to indict capital, class, or gentrification. It simply regrets the loss of a building.

The story draws on the real Yankee Pedlar Inn's folklore, yet it invents its ghost rather than revising any historical record. There is no lecture, no moral, no direct address to the audience. The film trusts slow burns, empty hallways, and a piano that plays itself. That restraint is admirable in a genre often given to noise. It also leaves the film with almost no contemporary social consciousness to measure. The final image of Claire's apparition at the window, followed by a slamming door, is a fine chill and nothing more. The Innkeepers is a well-made ghost story that asks nothing of its audience beyond patience and a tolerance for quiet dread.