Caroline takes a job as a hospice-care worker in the home of Violet and Ben Devereaux, a couple who live in a frayed plantation in the swampy delta outside of New Orleans. Ben has just suffered a stroke and is stuck in a wheelchair, unable to speak. Violet keeps a careful, paranoid eye on him.
But the giant home lurks with menace. Why are there no mirrors anywhere? Why does Ben act like a man trapped inside a body and trying to get out? And what's up in the attic? As Caroline explores the mysteries with a skeleton key that unlocks the doors in the home, she learns that the house was the scene of a lynching of two black servants. There's bound to be some spiritual payback.
Written by Ehren Kruger, who scripted the American remake of The Ring and the dour thriller, Arlington Road, The Skeleton Key delivers the inevitable twist ending, but the structure holds up well, and the cast moves things along. Hudson demonstrated real charisma as a groupie in the excellent Almost Famous but has stumbled in a series of brittle period pieces and silly romantic comedies. Playing a more sober character such as Caroline allows her to reconnect with her own natural instincts, and she and Rowlands, as Violet, play well off of each other.
Director Iain Softley eschews gross-out shock for an eerie and unsettled mood of gathering dread, but he can't quite pull off the mood this ghost story needs. What the film lacks is the freaky gothic grandeur of Angel Heart, in which private eye Mickey Rourke ventures to Louisiana and finds himself in a nightmare world of sex, magic and death. There's no one here to match Rourke's soul-corroded looks, or Robert DeNiro's sinister embodiment of darkness. The Skeleton Key is too flat and too chaste. Lives may be in danger here, but souls are safe. The devil, it seems, is on vacation.
Given the racial subtexts of the story, I can't help but think this whole project would have worked better with a black cast. As the movie's story descends more deeply into the magic arts known as hoodoo—Hudson begins frantically cobbling spells together and throwing red brick dust everywhere to ward off her enemies—I had the odd sense that, yet again, we're watching white people trying to act black. Can't we find some folks to throw down the real hoodoo?