Through the Peephole,Once More

CAST: Hilary Swank,Jeffrey Dean Morgan,Christopher Lee

Rating: **1/2

A lone woman lucking into an unbelievably fabulous apartment will have to face growing creepiness which in turn will lead to full blown terror: The Resident hits all the obligatory notes in a film that’s so generic that you can tell what the characters will do next much before they are primed for it.

Recovering from a bad relationship doctor Juliet (Swank) finds a large,beautifully appointed flat in Brooklyn. For cheap. With a handsome landlord (Morgan) thrown in. It seems pure luck. But soon weird things start to happen: she feels that she’s being watched,her every action monitored. Was her finding the flat happenstance? Or was it engineered?

Dark New York apartments and their tremulous tenants are a genre all by themselves. The unforgettable Rosemary’s Baby had a young woman being spied upon from keyholes-turned-into-peepholes. In Sliver,it was Sharon Stone’s turn. Now it’s Hilary Swank playing the reluctant victim of a stalker.

The first was a classic; in the second,Stone brought the right degree of sleaziness to the voyeurism: she’s just the kind of woman who is made for being secretly looked at as she disports in bathtubs. Swank works hard at being sexy and vulnerable,but she’s better off doing more square-jawed roles. Christopher Lee’s cameo as the too-friendly-old-man who lives in the building is the only element that generates requisite menace,except he’s on too briefly.

The mandatory never-ending bloody climax has Juliet fighting back the predator,giving us a couple of scary moments,but it’s all very seen-it,done-it.

Shubhra Gupta-shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com