The Resident
Director: Antti Jokinen
Writer: Antti Jokinen, Robert Orr
Cast: Hilary Swank, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Lee Pace, Christopher Lee

Plot:
Juliet (Hilary Swank) just broke up with her boyfriend Jack (Lee Pace), so she’s looking for a new apartment. And she can barely believe her luck when she finds a huge apartement at a very low prize and with the really sexy landlord Max (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). But things that seem too good to be true often are and so it quickly turns out that Max isn’t only into Juliet, he’s completely obsessed with her and watches her at every moment.

The movie has beautiful art direction and a great cast but it unfortunately fails to create any kind of tension whatsoever.

The movie has so many things going for it – I mean, I don’t think I have to tell anybody how amazing that cast is to begin with. I mean, those are some fine actors. But unfortunately, Hilary Swank’s Juliet doesn’t really get much depth. Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Max is great in the beginning, but when things get out of hand, he loses the grasp on the character. Lee Pace has about 10 minutes screen time and that’s way too little Lee Pace (for any film, I’d say, but especially for a film that actually cast Lee Pace). And Christopher Lee is even less on sceen (which might be a good thing because I was entirely distracted by how much he sounded like King Haggard again. In other films he doesn’t that much).

Apart from the squandered cast, the movie has plot holes the size of entire countries (for ecample, even if 3800 bucks is cheap for an apartment like that, it is not cheap for a single working person and who would post a “I’m looking for an apartment” ad? It’s usually the other way round, isn’t it?).

But the real death sentence for the movie was the utter lack of tension. You just never got invested into the characters or the story and then the movie developed in such a classic way that suspense or tension had no chance to come up whatsoever.

The only thing that really, really worked beautifully and wonderfully and awesomely was the cinematography. That was one damn pretty film. Unfortunately that was not enough.

Summarising: you can skip it.