The Skeleton Key

Few films exploit setting so fully and foolishly as The Skeleton Key (2005). Set in New Orleans and surrounding areas, it would have you believe that the rural South, especially Louisiana, is infused with superstition, magic, voodoo, hoodoo, decay, decadence, sweat, endless rain, gators, and Zydeco. It assaults its viewers with images of broken down shacks, blind people who speak ominous if incoherent portents, ghosts, photographs of ghoulish children, desiccated and unidentifiable animal corpses, lynchings, a magic store in a Laundromat. There are the menacing chickens, one of which turns up for dinner. And of course there is Kate Hudson in an impressive array of skimpy clothes. The South in this film is a place of hidden evil, superstition, danger, decay, madness, and the unexplainable. It is always dark, and always raining. Gothic horror up the wazoo.

“She won’t understand the house,” moans Violet Devereaux (Gena Rowlands), the matriarch of the old plantation house to which Caroline Ellis (Hudson) goes to take a job nursing a dying old man. The meaning of this ominous pronouncement is really a red herring, but it grips our attention for a while. Ellis is from Hoboken, New Jersey, and, yes, like Shreve McCannon, she doesn’t understand the South, at least not the South of this film. Nor would anyone else, probably. Caroline is an adventurous soul. There isn’t a single locked door or darkened passageway or ominous attic into which she doesn’t venture. The old adage of where there’s smoke there’s fire apparently never dawns on Ellis. The most ridiculous moment comes when she is in the darkened attic and there is a small locked room which her key (the “skeleton key”) won’t open. Moreover, something seems to be IN that room, rattling the locks and banging on the door to get out. Is it the mad woman in the attic? Is it Frankenstein’s monster? Is it Jimmy Hoffa? Like every good horror movie heroine, unarmed and dimly lit, Caroline Ellis enthusiastically attacks the door, trying to let out whatever is banging around in there. In a later scene she succeeds in getting into the room.

The centerpiece of the film is the 30-room Devereaux mansion. Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner knew how to use old Southern mansions, and their influence is faintly evident here. At least I wanted to think so. This old Gothic Southern mansion holds a hidden secret, it’s in that room in the attic, and you know it’s going to find its way out. It’s all tied up with magic and human depravity and evil and the history of the place. Part of the secret harkens back to a party at the turn of the century that ended in a lynching. The lynching is supposed to remind you that this story takes place in the South where every black tie dinner ends in a ritualistic murder of servants. By this point in the film, things are rapidly falling apart—not so much the events in the film as the film itself.

The first 45 minutes or so of this film were bad but tolerable. At least you had some interest in how the plot was going to play itself out, how all the ominous premonitions and foreboding hints and foreshadowings would congeal in whatever horrific consummation the film would offer. But in the last half the momentum builds and you know where the film is going, you know exactly where it is going, even if you don’t have the details.

The Skeleton Key would have you believe that every African American in Louisiana is somehow involved in dark magic. One black character, Caroline’s friend Jill, says she does not believe in hoodoo, but she is clearly afraid of it. Superstition and the occult are part of the ambience associated with the Louisiana setting of the film. Yet there is a kind of racism here that broadly indicts virtually every person of color in the film.

I was reminded of The Vanishing, a 1988 French and Belgian film directed by George Sluizer, in which events come to a conclusion remotely similar to the one in The Skeleton Key. Both films build a thick and moody atmosphere of ominous dread, but The Vanishing has an intelligent script, is well made, and offers an interesting psychological understory. I was also reminded of a 1987 film directed by Alan Parker, Angel Heart, also set partially near New Orleans and concerned with voodoo and the occult. It too builds to an ending with a dark if predictable twist.

The Skeleton Key will raise the hairs on your arm. It may also make you yawn. And if you’re from Hoboken, you may think you’ve learned something.