Picturenose

Bone shaker
A bona fide horror flick, The Skeleton Key is the suspenseful tale of young Caroline Ellis (Kate Hudson), a hospice carer who, disillusioned with the easy-come-easy-go attitude at the New Orleans hospital where she’s been working, lands a job at a fading mansion an hour up the road. There, she meets the cranky Violet Devereaux (Gena Rowlands) and her paralysed, dying husband Ben (John Hurt). Despite Violet’s reservations about our gal, the couple’s lawyer, Luke (Peter Sarsgaard) is on hand to help convince the matriarch that her prospective employee is more than just a city slicker. However, in the best tradition of Southern gothic, the house holds secrets - and some doors were meant never to be opened, even if you do have a skeleton key…

British director Iain Softley, whose previous film was the intriguing ‘is he an alien?’ K-PAX (2001) with Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey, has always had a fondness for the spook genre: “I think it’s very interesting to deal with the way the normal world comes into contact with the unknown - with the occult, or things outside of what we call rational, normal experience. Films like Don’t Look Now, Rosemary’s Baby, Kubrick’s The Shining - even, in a way, his 2001 - are about the scientific world coming into contact with something that is outside. That’s why we grounded the character of Caroline in the hospital to begin with. She’s a real person, and it’s about character.”

A coup for Softley was the casting of John Hurt, who has barely one line of dialogue in the entire film, as Ben: “This is the question I like answering most,” he explains, proudly. “Hurt’s agent pursued me for the role. It seemed to me self-evident, on three or four levels really. One, if you’re an actor of John’s calibre, the challenge of playing the multi-dimensional aspect of Ben; of being skillful enough to communicate with just your eyes. John was very excited about this film and he thought it was a great opportunity for him. He took it with both hands and kicked it out of the park.”

And the voodoo, or more accurately, hoodoo that is at the film’s core? The Skeleton Key is a story that could only take place in America’s Deep South because it deals with hoodoo, a US form of magic and witchcraft that’s native to the region - and it’s actually markedly different from what we know as voodoo. Voodoo is a religion; hoodoo is practical magic - to entice or push away a lover, to heal a sick child or bring suffering on a wrongdoer.

It draws on a number of folkloric beliefs, African, Native American and European. The hoodoo practitioner is called a conjurer, or root doctor, since many of the spells or conjures involve the power of plants and roots.

Death is part of life in New Orleans. “The city’s cemeteries are tourist attractions,” says Softley, “and everyone has stories of the supernatural.”

To say much more would only spoil the mood - which comes in bucketloads, in place of the customary blood and guts laid on with a trowel - and the final twist which is, well, magic. See it for yourself, but don’t get too scared, y’all hear me…

104 mins.