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Looking for one of the best horror movies to watch on streaming services? The Last Inn is a horror movie about ghosts transpiring in a big creepy location. A young woman, Laura, has an accident in the middle of nowhere.
When faced with twelve-plus hours, twenty-mile hike to the next town, or a short walk of 1.5 miles to the Lawst Inn she opts for the latter. The inn is run by a couple of decidedly eerie old-timers Mr. And Mrs. Lawst.
There is also the mysterious Steven, a guy at the inn that gives Laura a strong sense of Deja’vu, a family of three with a young boy, a young girl (presumably with her parents), and a young couple. Otherwise, the inn is empty.
It’s crazy that the the Lawsts say all the rooms are booked, because the keys of all the rooms are there, in the front desk’s room key’s board. Conveniently, they are pretty much cut off from civilization since the phone lines are broken, the nearest mechanic is fifty miles away, and the couple’s car is out of order.
Soon after Laura arrives she begins to encounter scary, alarming things, some of them defying a rational explanation. I couldn’t get my eyes off Laura, since Emily Hall is a very attractive actress and I wouldn’t say anything else about her since it’s probably going to be biased.
There was also something that felt very unsettling to me in the way Mrs. Lawst reacted to Laura’s reasonable questions and the overall nonchalant, deadpan personality of Mr. Lawst that made me believe both characters.
The Last Inn’s Cinematography
I am a lover of vintage ghost movies. It’s debatable whether you can call a ghost movie an epic movie. But some of them, for me, are just that, epic horror movies. Most of these are movies that are around fifty years old.
Too much water has passed under the bridge since then, and there are textures of the different media the movies were filmed back then that are nigh impossible to reproduce. But sometimes filmmakers make efforts and achieve what to me is using all the other resources those movies used, except the physical media the movie is actually filmed in and I think the feel I’m talking about is somewhat evoked.
For instance, there are outside shots of the inn that add a lot of value to the movie. The ghosts appearing in technological gadgets scenes were very enjoyable. I want to mention some dreamy scenes in the last part of the movie.
If you pay attention you notice they are heavily post-processed, but they look like a million, to me. I get others may not like them, but what are movies if not an audiovisual form of art where everything goes?
Sometimes bold decisions like the twilight post-processed scenes in The Last Inn I’m talking about make it all the more fun to watch. Not at the plot level, this movie truly feels, for moments, like an epic ghost movie in the vein of The Haunting (1963) or The Turning of The Screw (1974). A somewhat chilled, laid-back existential horror without any need for cheap cliches, jump scares, or gore to keep you at the edge of your seat while watching it.
Pace, Audio and Thrills
At around 100 minutes I can’t say I felt for a moment that the movie dragged in any way. The tone was very spot-on for this kind of movie. Except for a musical sequence in the last third of the movie, I didn’t notice anything to either praise or knockdown in the sound fx and music departments.
I was already getting sort of sad and full of angst not fully comprehending what was going on when the music sequence came I just fast-forwarded it because it was going to add to those two feelings, I’m sure.
This movie has its quite creepy sights at the simple visual horror level, and its moments of horrid surprises; they are masterfully interspersed with the more down-to-earth moments.
Recommendations
The troubled (goth?) wife of the creepy couple with the young kid at the inn was very fun to watch, and probably the element of the movie that delighted me the most was the thing it does by mixing ghosts with technology.
I guess the social message of the movie is that transcendental love can emerge from a spiritually-dead environment like a university. This movie has a satisfying Christ consciousness moral, but I don’t want to say anything more so as to not spoil it.
The moral of the movie’s story is very difficult to miss. This movie is a certain refined type of horror movie, but I won’t say which kind, but it can be grouped with others. The end is bitter-sweet but definitely less heavy and depressing than others in doing the same horror/ghost sub-genre.
Anyone who loves movies like The Haunting, The Turn of The Screw, The House on Haunted Hill, The Shining, The Woman in Black, etc should definitely watch this. I can’t recommend this movie to fans of this kind of movie by naming similar movies without revealing the plot mechanics and thus spoiling it so if you want 0 spoilers STOP READING NOW!
Spoiler Recommendations
This movie is a dead-all-along horror movie like Reeker, Dead End, or The Lovely Bones. Personally, I love this kind of movie, but I wouldn’t want anyone spoiling the facts for me before I watch them. Currently streaming from free on:
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© Bholenath Valsan 2024 — The Last Inn Best Horror Movies on Streaming Services
