Review: ‘The Loft’

“The Loft” is a twisty, turny thriller trying to be like a mix of Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma and definitely falling short. If you like movies that have multiple plot twists because 2 or 3 just aren’t enough, then this is the movie for you, if you don’t mind some hyper editing and weird camerawork and overall silliness.

Vincent (Karl Urban) is a successful architect with a doting wife, four friends and a spare loft. He tells his friends that the five of them can share the loft and they can use it for their secret extramarital trysts. One morning, they find a dead woman in their loft and no one knows how she got there. Are they being set up? If so, then by who? Or is one of them lying to the others? As the five of them stand over the body and accuse each other of stuff and yell and scream and cry, we also get flashbacks of their whole story, starting with the introduction of the loft into their lives and then the different ways these guys used the loft, and how all of that may have possibly led them to their present moment of discovering a murder.

This movie might have been okay if they took a more straight forward approach to both telling the story and the visual approach of the movie. The whole flashback structure seems unnecessary. It may have been more interesting if they just told the whole story in chronological order, so that the murder is discovered about halfway through the movie. The constantly cutting back and forth feels very 1990’s, like splitting up the timeline would somehow make the whole thing more interesting or exciting, but really it is just kind of hacky. And then there are a lot of close ups of characters and a camera that moves around a lot, with lots of quick editing, and none of it was impressive or improved the story or helped tell the story visually. It just seemed like a lot of stuff designed to make the movie seem cooler than it was.

The pulpy mystery at the center of the plot, with the emphasis of the five friends doubting each other, feels very Hitchcockian, but “The Loft” lacks the visual grace and patience of Alfred Hitchcock’s best movies. And the sex-based plotting and intrigue certainly feels like Brian De Palma, but at his absolute worst. There is a lot of seduction and sex in this thing, but it lacks the punch and panache of a “Femme Fatale” or “Dressed to Kill,” it feels pretty rote and kind of “Cinemax-y,” know what I mean? None of it is shocking or even exciting, and this kind of extends to the rest of the movie.

There really isn’t too much to say about this movie. The acting is okay enough, it’s all just kind of forgettable really. It never gets to so bad its good territory and really isn’t that good to begin with, so it really just comes across as a direct-to-dvd mystery type of thing. One year from now, no one will remember this thing, so why put any more energy into it.