Review: The Loft

A stylish whodunit scaffolded with the requisite misdirects and multi-betrayals, The Loft is the second remake of director Erik Van Looy's 2008 thriller, which was hugely popular in his native Belgium. Van Looy appears to have issues letting go as not only has he helmed this American remake, but he stepped in during the production of the 2010 Dutch version whilst director Antoinette Beumer was recovering from an on-set accident. Judging from this and Dutch director George Sluizer's mishandling of the American remake of his Spoorloos (The Vanishing), perhaps there should be a temporary moratorium on foreign directors handling American transfers of their films.

Though not as criminally lost in translation as The Vanishing, The Loft remains a visually striking but impoverished piece of storytelling, with all its plot machinations much ado about nothing. A dead body opens the film but before we discover the identity of this particular corpse, we're presented with another lifeless form: a naked blond handcuffed to the bedpost, half-covered by a bedsheet and her blood. The scene of the crime is the titular loft, a sleek apartment co-owned by five men who have designated it as their private, cost-efficient rendezvous spot for their adulterous affairs. "No messy hotel bills, no questionable credit card activity," Vincent (Karl Urban) assures his friends as he provides each of them with a key.

The womanising Vincent is one of the five likely suspects along with the vulgar and boorish Marty (Eric Stonestreet), the repressed and jealous Luke (Wentworth Miller), the hot-tempered cokehead Philip (Mattias Schoenaerts, reprising his role from the original), and Philip's upstanding and sensitive half-brother Chris (James Marsden). All men offer alibis that are not exactly watertight, and all are guilty of one misdeed or another. As for the mystery blond, it could be self-consciously slinky Sarah (Isabel Lucas), who fell hard for Vincent after he bedded her during a business trip in San Diego. Or it could be Anne (Rachael Taylor), the self-consciously Hitchcockian blond who has a penchant for falling for the wrong men and spouting out laughable clunkers like, "I'm a whore. I'm a prostitute. I sleep with men for money."

The Loft is rife with such dialogue, which almost always becomes unintentionally snicker-worthy because everyone insists on taking the lines seriously. An erotic thriller such as this needs to laugh, or at least wink, at itself. That lack of humour undermines a film already entangled in one-dimensionality and implausibility. Any semblance of sensibility utterly eludes these men, whose reactions are the equivalent of bringing rocket launchers to a knife fight.

Van Looy does nothing here that he didn't already do in the original. Screenwriter Wesley Strick has basically taken Bart De Pauw's original screenplay and slapped his own name on it. It's shocking how seemingly little effort was made to improve, or at least slightly differentiate, the remake from the original. As for the actors, the less said about their strained performances, the better.

The Loft

Directed by: Erik Van Looy

Written by: Wesley Strick; adapted from Bart De Pauw's screenplay

Starring: Karl Urban, James Marsden, Wentworth Miller, Eric Stonestreet, Matthias Schoenaerts, Rachael Taylor, Rhona Mitra, Isabel Lucas, Margarita Levieva, Kristin Lehman, Robert Wisdom, Elaine Cassidy, Valerie Cruz, Kali Rocha