Review of The Resident (2011) by Mike M — 10 Mar 2011

Isn't beyond clumsiness, electing to rewind events at the half-hour mark so as to make clear something everything bar the most bovine of teenagers in the audience will have already twigged. For most of its brisk 91 minutes, however, it plays as functioning hokum, playing up the more perverse aspects of its otherwise pared-back psychosexual premise in some very un-Hollywood ways: the hider-in-the-house emerges from under Swank's bed as she sleeps, so as to suck on her fingers, and will later come to drug her with insulin just to cop a feel.

After the regrettable haircut and mannerisms "Amelia" stuck her with, Swank, accordingly, is back to something like appealing form; it's good we get a grown woman, capable of suggesting accumulated psychological baggage, in a part that could very easily have gone to an Odette Yustman or Leighton Meester.

The previously jobbing (and reliably resistable) Morgan finally arrives at the role he was born to play - a mouthbreather who obtains sexual frissons from an electric toothbrush - and it's aiming for an unusual demographic: women who live alone in the city - and pyjama party attendees who some day aspire to live alone in the city - whose worst fears involve a violation of their cherished personal space.

Telling that the weirdo should finally be caught while raiding the heroine's closet, signalled as a breach too far; this is New York, after all, where nobody rumples another woman's dress and gets away with it.