Voodoo has always been very poorly represented cinematically. At its heart a beautiful, passionate religion, most filmmakers are content with reducing it to bone-rattling black magic useful only for wicked ends. Even more "mature" outings like The Serpent and the Rainbow (review here) and London Voodoo (review here), while well-versed in their subject matter, end up pissing away their credibility in contrived, over-the-top final acts. It's a disappointment, because audience engagement at the feasibility of the acts happening in the film will be dashed away in a splatter of gore or special-effects hokum.

Enter The Skeleton Key, which boasts an all-star cast of Kate Hudson, John Hurt, and Gena Rowlands, as well as a script by Ehren Kruger (responsible for the westernization of The Ring). One hopes that with such a great cast, and some proper backing, that Hollywood could finally deliver a truly adult film about voodoo without resorting to their usual tricks...

Caroline Ellis (Kate Hudson) has had enough of her job as a hospice worker, where the patients are treated less like people and more like case studies. Feeling guilt over the loss of her last patient (as well as residual guilt over the recent death of her father), she responds to a classified ad paying the tidy sum of $1,000.00 a week to a qualified in-home caregiver. She meets Violet Devereaux (Rowlands) and her invalid husband Ben (Hurt), who recently suffered a stroke and is in his last days. Despite protest from Violet ("She ain't from the South!"), Caroline is given the position by the Devereaux' estate lawyer Luke (the wooden Peter Sarsgaard). Caroline senses things are amiss when she discovers all the mirrors in the house have been taken down, and Ben occasionally breaks through his stupor to give her a look of quiet desperation. Even though Violet claims he is virtually paralyzed by the stroke, Ben manages to climb out of his window and tries to escape by dragging himself by his arms (his legs are still fairly atrophied) across the roof. Even stranger, Caroline finds a locked room in the attic filled with herbs, skulls, fetishes, and jarred things. Demanding answers, Violet spills the beans about the house's dark past: it was the home of the Thorpes, who lynched their hoodoo-practicing servants when they discovered them educating the Thorpe children in the ways of conjure. The spirits, Violet hypothesizes, still angrily wander the halls of the house, and are the ones who harmed her husband. They could only be seen in the mirrors, thus requiring all mirrors in the home be taken down.

After determining that Violet's own hoodoo practices (protecting the house with lines of brick dust) could very well be the psychosomatic ailment plaguing Ben, Caroline sets out to explore the seedy underbelly of hoodoo in order to help save the desperate Ben from his crackpot wife and his own superstitions...or so she thinks.

The first thing that sticks out about Skeleton Key is its attention to detail. It's obvious Kruger did his homework on hoodoo, as not only does he differentiate it from voodoo (although the two are certainly intermingled), but he manages to put it out on display, for the most part, without over sensationalizing it. It's shown, warts and all, with a certain degree of integrity, maturity, and...gasp...subtlety!. However, Kruger, together with director Iain Softley (whose previous efforts include Hackers and the unforgivably glurgy K-PAX), manage to keep the tension high without dropping the ball...until, bane of all voodoo films, the final act. There, the audience is pummeled with double- and triple-crosses, Caroline speedily brick-dusting all the doors, poisonings, shotguns, rituals of sacrifice, compound leg fractures...the movie, which up to this point had navigated through its 104 minute running time at a fairly leisurely pace, suddenly went off like it had a firecracker lit up under its ass. Why, why, does this happen? I've seen plenty of films be overly climactic, but films about voodoo truly seem to be the worst offenders. Maybe it comes down to the fact that voodoo simply isn't as scandalous as everyone makes it out to be: it's really no "better or worse" than Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any other religion out there. Perhaps when people really dig down deep, they see that it's not all that nasty.

However, ridiculous climax or not, the performances in Skeleton Key are, for the most part, fantastic. Kate Hudson injects Caroline with the right mixture of independent feminism, almost maternal caring towards Ben, and wide-eyed city girl naivete. Even though I've never been a big fan of hers (she's got that odd "can't-out-your-finger-on-it" feel about her), you find yourself actually caring for her character and worrying about the nasty situation she's in. Gena Rowlands plays the doting "Old South" woman with genuine gusto while still hiding some dirty little secrets behind her proper veneer. The dinner-table face-off between her and Hudson was one of the most satisfying match of wits I've seen in years, with minimal dialogue and shifty glances (as well as a few well-played strategic maneuvers) giving me that dopey "that's-so-cool" smile throughout its duration. Speaking of minimal dialogue, special mention has to be made of John Hurt, who conveys a wider range of emotion with a few contortions of his face than most actors can with a thousand lines of dialogue. His performance certainly makes the movie. The same can't be said for Peter Sarsgaard, whose quasi-Creole inflections seem to come and go at will during his flat deliveries.

The Skeleton Key, as a final product, is much like the voodoo/hoodoo that it's about: a strange mish-mash of different pieces brought together into a new beast. It's a traditional thriller tinged with mysticism and some supernatural heebie-jeebies, wrapped up in some damn fine acting. Unlike voodoo however, it doesn't quite have that magical spark, in this case a truly solid narrative, that ties it all together to make it something truly special.

Thumbs sideways. Pretty damn good, but the overly busy, chaotic ending drags it down.