The Loft

One of the first images we see in The Loft is the figure of a body falling from a great height, and then smashing onto the roof of a car down below.  The movie then flashes to a different point in time, where a man walks into a loft apartment, and finds a dead woman lying on a bloodstained bed, her hand handcuffed to the headboard of the bed.  Both of these are great, attention-grabbing images.  Then we're in another time and place, this time a police station, where another man is being grilled by police officers about the dead woman.  Then we're back in the room with the dead woman, where another man walks in on the scene.  The movie is only 10 minutes old, and it's already trying to throw us off course.

That's because The Loft is a movie that wants us to think its smart.  It throws every trick in the book at us.  It misdirects us, it tells its story out of sequence, it flashes backwards, it flashes forwards, and it leads us all over the map.  The only thing it doesn't do is allow us to figure out its own mystery.  That's because this is one of those movies where there are no right answers.  The movie deliberately hides important information from us, so in a later scene, it can go back and show us what we didn't see before, because it happened off camera.  We're supposed to smack our heads, and be amazed at how smart the movie is and how it fooled us again, I suppose.  It's not that the film is all that hard to follow, really.  It's just with how much the narrative jumps around, you catch on quick that the movie is intentionally trying to hide something from you, and you realize that it exists simply to jerk the audience around until it decides to give us the answers.  We're not supposed to play along and solve the mystery, we're just supposed to feel dumb.

Of course, some people in the audience may already know the answers as to how this all turns out, as this is the third time the story has been told.  The film was originally made in Belgium back in 2008, and was made again in the Netherlands in 2010.  Now it's Hollywood's turn, and they've brought along the same director who worked on the previous two versions, Erik Van Looy.  He must be getting tired of telling the same story again and again, and that might explain why for all of its countless plot twists and red herrings, the movie never quite seems alive.  Or maybe that's because the adapted screenplay by Wesley Strick (2010's A Nightmare on Elm Street) is more concerned with fooling us, than it is in making us care about the characters and the situation they're in.  All of the ingredients are here to create a compelling Hitchcock-style mystery, but it doesn't gel.  Whether something got lost in the adaptation, or whether this is something that carried over from the earlier versions I cannot say, as I have not seen the previous films.

The film centers on five best friends.  They include the cool and smarmy architect Vincent (Karl Urban), all around nice guy Chris (James Marsden), Chris' frequently angry and violent half-brother Philip (Matthias Schoenaerts, who starred in the original Belgium version), the overweight and sex-driven Marty (Eric Stonestreet), and the quiet and reserved Luke (Wentworth Miller).  All of the five men are married, but all find themselves having their eyes on other women.  That's when Vincent hits upon what he thinks is a brilliant idea.  He builds a private loft in his new apartment building that all five of them will share.  He gives each of them a key, and tells them that they can all use the loft for their own private sexual escapades.  There will be no hotel bills that they will have to hide from their wives, and they can use it whenever they want.  The movie never answers the obvious question as to what happens if one of the guys wants to use the room, and someone else is using it at the same time. 

The five guys agree to the arrangement, and start bringing a variety of young women up to the room on their own.  Then we get the scene that opened the film, with Luke being the one who walks into the room and finds the murdered woman on the bed.  All five men are brought into the room, and they immediately start turning against each other as they try to figure out who the murderer is.  There is no sign of forced entry, so the killer obviously had a key to the loft, so that makes any one of them a suspect.  As the guys try to sort out who was where and when, we get more and more flashbacks to their individual private lives, their past meetings, and even some flash forwards to when the men are being questioned by the police.  Of course, nothing is what it seems.  That is something that Strick's screenplay takes to heart with a vengeance.  It's constantly doubling back and replaying earlier flashbacks, showing us information it neglected to show us before.  As the red herrings and misdirections pile up, we find ourselves just sitting and waiting for the truth to be revealed, because we know that any information the movie gives us is probably going to be proven wrong in another scene about 15 minutes later.

The Loft is a movie filled with miserable people.  The five main guys are sleazy, obsessed with sex, and have so many secrets it sort of becomes laughable by the end.  The women in the film basically fall into two categories - bored wives who suspect their husbands are unfaithful, or prostitutes that the men bring up to the room.  Of course, the wives end up having secrets of their own, because that's the kind of movie this is.  Nobody is allowed to be who they are on the surface.  Everybody has to have some kind of dark, sexual secret that is scored with dramatic music on the soundtrack, and one of the other characters flying into some sort of rage.  Everybody seems to be out to get everybody, and when the final answers finally come, it ends up being...none of the above.  This is a movie so obsessed with pulling the rug out from under us that it sacrifices crucial elements like character development or interesting dialogue.  I guess we're supposed to be thrilled with each twist of the plot, but I got a little frustrated when some of those twists started to have twists of their own.

The thing is, I think The Loft could have been an interesting little mystery if it wasn't so obsessed with tricking us, and actually dug into its own psychology.  For all of its multiple twists and turns, this really doesn't add up to a whole lot.  It's not even all that sexy of an erotic thriller.  But hey, at least it's better than The Boy Next Door!

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