The Skeleton Key

This occult thriller centers on a young nursing student who is tired of working for a heartless hospice business and so accepts a job as a live-in caregiver for a mute and largely paralyzed stroke victim (John Hurt).

To be accepted for the job, she has to deal with the thinly-veiled doubt and hostility of the man's wife, ably played by the veteran actress Gena Rowlands. Morally supported and championed by the family's handsome young attorney (Peter Sarsgaard) she is accepted and begins her job in this old southern home which looks something like a scaled-down plantation mansion, complete with columns on the front porch, a brick wall, and a wrought iron gate.

As she performs her duties, she has lots of spare time and rather impolitely starts wandering into parts of the house which one would think are none of her business, such as the attic. There she encounters a locked door which starts shaking as though someone on the other side wants to get out.

When she eventually does get into this room, it turns out to be what her young black girlfriend tells her is a "hoodoo room." We are told that "hoodoo" isn't to be confused with "voodoo." The latter is an actual religion, the former is the practice of casting white and black magical spells.

This sets of the mystery of the story: Why is there a hoodoo room in this house? How much does the wife know about it? Does it have anything to do with the husband's affliction?

She finds out that in the past, the owners of the house at that time had a pair of servants who practiced hoodoo, and who were lynched on a day when the owners' two children disappeared.

Naturally, as with any movie like this, it has a twist ending. And like almost every thriller, it tends to fall apart at the end, with people we thought of as good being evil and people turning out to be not at all who we thought they were. And of course there's the standard running and hiding and attacking.

As you may have guessed, if this is the sort of thing you like, you'll probably like it. It's certainly not the worst of the genre while it certainly can't claim to be the best. It fails by comparison with last year's Hide and Seek, but it's certainly far better than such recent films as House of Wax and Dreamcatcher.