Mark Reviews Movies: THE INHABITANT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 6, 2022

More than a century on, we're still fascinated by the mystery of Lizzie Borden, whose father and stepmother were brutally murdered with an axe in their home. The 32-year-old daughter was tried and acquitted of the killings, but the public suspicion of her guilt has remained a constant 130 years later. That's true of The Inhabitant, too, which supposes some kind of Borden curse—either mental illness or an actual ghost—that figuratively or literally haunts descendants of the family of the accused murderer to this very day.

Kevin Bachar's screenplay, then, has a decent premise. The story revolves around some of those Borden descendants, living in modern times and trying to keep that curse at bay. There's some potential here, to be sure. It all depends, though, upon the direction in which Bachar and director Jerren Lauder take that setup, which is presented in pieces of opening text that disappear so quickly that it's as if the filmmakers don't want us to give more than a second's thought to the specifics.

The basics involve Tara (Odessa A'zion), a teenage girl who begins having nightmares and dark visions of killing her baby brother. Her mother Emily (Leslie Bibb) suspects something might be wrong and worries about Tara, because of that family curse and its apparent effect on her own sister, who's currently locked away in a psychiatric facility. Tara's father Ben (Dermot Mulroney) is a bit too distracted with work and some troubles in the marriage to take too much notice.

Before all of that, though, the movie gets to the real core of its plot, which has to do with a series of murders—all of them committed with an axe—that are occurring in town. Each of the victims has a direct connection to Tara, and given her nightmarish hallucinations and increasingly inability to distinguish them from reality, she starts to fear she might be capable of murder—if she hasn't already killed.

This isn't just about Tara and her apparent descent into some sort of mental illness or, as the screenplay offers up as a distinct but equally vague possibility, her encounters with the actual ghost of Lizzie. The movie, by the way, never clarifies which of these is the true state of matters with the curse, and while that's certainly a lesser problem than the way the plotting unfolds, it certainly doesn't help us to understand how and why these episodes and killings are happening in the first place. Either option—mental illness or ghostly possession—feels a bit exploitative, anyway, so maybe it's for the best that Bachar doesn't make a clear-cut case.

As for the plot, it's little more than a generic murder mystery, with victims being murdered by an enigmatic figure—wearing a dress, carrying an axe, with a face that's perfectly hidden in shadow regardless of the location or time of day—one by one. From there, it's simply a matter of figuring out who the killer is, and obviously, the cast is filled with potential suspects and red herrings—until they're violently removed from that list one at a time.

Some of them include Tara, of course, and her family members (Both the mother and father hint at having or sharing some kind of secret). There's also the aunt (played by Hartleigh Buwick), locked away in that facility, on account of a similar incident, but apparently able to just sneak out of the place to throw some suspicion in her direction.

Meanwhile, Tara's best friend Suzy (Lizze Broadway) is seemingly obsessed with the teen, owns some old-timey dresses (made by Tara, by the by, just to add to the clues against her), and tries to hide some blood on her hands shortly after one of the murders. The point, obviously, is that the movie keeps throwing possible killers and pieces of apparently damning evidence at us, until there's no way to keep track of the motives, the clues, or even the mechanics of how anyone could commit and keep getting away with all these killings.

Apart from some scenes of Tara looking up legends about the Borden murders online (being sure to highlight the parts we're supposed to notice) and a trip to the Borden house with her boyfriend (played by Michael Cooper Jr.), the entire concept of some connection to that history feels more like a marketable hook than a developed idea. Ultimately, The Inhabitant is nothing more than a game of obfuscation, deflection, and intentional confusion.

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