Horror has a way of uniting its audience: If there’s gore, we wince. If there’s a shock, we jump. If a girl runs screaming orgasmically from a chainsaw-wielding maniac and somehow loses her top, half the audience grins sleazily while their dates grow angry and insecure. But during the screening of The Resident, the uniting force was a single audience member’s cry, a desperate exclamation of helplessness that captured the emotion felt by us all. This despairing voice emerging from the dark of the cinema said one thing: “This is shite!”
In this bewilderingly abysmal horror from first-time director Annti Jokinen, single white female Juliet (Hilary Swank) moves into a stunning apartment with a ridiculously low rent and a handsome landlord, Max (Javier Bradem lookalike Jeffrey Dean Morgan).
“Is there a catch?” she asks. Oh Hilary. There’s always a catch. Within minutes it’s clear that someone is watching her from peepholes and hiding spaces around her apartment, and tense music and heavy breathing let us know that it isn’t Santa.
After a completely superfluous 20 minute flashback sequence lets us know that Juliet’s stalker isn’t the old man we never suspected in the first place and is indeed the guy we always knew it was, The Resident descends into agonisingly boring and tension-free cliché. For 91 minutes Swank bathes, rubs lotion on herself, puts on wet t-shirts, doesn’t put on pants and bathes again, while Morgan checks off a list of stereotypical “crazy” behaviour, banging his head off walls, rocking back and forth and rubbing himself against Juliet’s clothes like an excited puppy who’s taken a shine to your leg.
But after an endless, plotless, atmosphere-less cycle of watching and being watched, it’s the audience who turned out to be the sadistic voyeur, as we all knew that we had just watched the death of a film director’s career before it had even started.
And that fact made us all smile.