A film review by Craig J. Koban July 9, 2015

THE LOFT  

2015, R, 108 mins.

THE LOFT commits multiple cinematic sins.  

It’s an erotic mystery thriller that’s not sensual, nor particularly suspenseful or enthralling as a who-dunnit.  Worse yet, it seems positively unnecessary, seeing as director Erik Van Looy already made this film in 2008 in a Dutch-language version.  

For certain, Van Looy has made a film that aesthetically looks slick and atmospheric, not to mention that he has gathered together a terrific star-studded ensemble cast of talented actors that any film would be proud to have on board.  Regrettably, the fine actors here are all, more or less, playing characters without much rooting interest; nearly everyone that populates THE LOFT is either shady, duplicitous minded, pure evil, or an eerie combination of the three.  In the end, I simply didn’t care for anyone in this film and the dicey moral predicaments they became embroiled in.  As a result, THE LOFT feels woefully shallow. 

The film – with a credited adapted screenplay to Wesley Strick – also feels manipulative and a bit too mechanically engineered for its own good.  It rarely leaves you guessing like its more competent genre entries and it definitely thinks that it’s slyer and more intelligent than it actually is on paper.  The aforementioned loathsome characters in the story are five friends – architect Vincent (Karl Urban), psychiatrist Chris (James Masden), hothead Marty (Eric Stonestreet), quiet mannered Luke (Wentworth Miller) and the unhinged Phillip (Matthias Schoenaerts) – are all in marriages that, through reasons never fully explored, seem to be boring them.  They universally decide that the best way to quench their marital boredom and monotony is to purchase a lavish and spacious loft apartment (that Vincent has designed) in order for them to each have their way with their respective mistresses whenever they see fit.  

Remember, I said these guys were loathsome. 

Of course, some of the men fear the obvious repercussions of getting caught by their significant others, but the sinful allure of having consequence free sex in private quarters is too difficult for all of them to resist.  They all decide on some basic ground rules to ensure that their wives are none the wiser to their extracurricular sextivities.  They all have a key and there’s only one way in or out of the loft, meaning that if one makes a mistake on his watch and/or turn…it’s on them.  Everything seems to be going smoothly for the men…that is until Luke comes to the loft one day to find the dead body of a young woman, handcuffed to the post and covered in blood.  Panic stricken and unsure of what to do, Luke calls Vincent, but within no time all of the men show up on scene to survey the damage.  Now, since no one else has a key to the loft outside of their tightly knit party, the men quickly deduce that one of them is the guilty party for being this girl’s killer.  But…which…one…is it? 

THE LOFT begins rather compellingly, but then it very quickly devolves into a narrative riddled with flashbacks, flashforwards back to the present, only followed by more flashbacks and flashforwards to the point of making the whole plot feel overly convoluted and confused.  Overall, Strick’s script goes through many predicable and conventional genre beats – the early suspicions and denials driven by misunderstandings, mistrust, and angry debates regarding the loyalty of everyone – but this type of scripting is only intoxicating when it contains characters we give a damn about.  There’s no real tangible emotional attachment that the audience can legitimately form with any of these cretins.  It’s one thing for characters to be underdeveloped and cut from the same clichéd clothe, but it’s a whole other matter when they’re all essentially sleaze balls that don’t deserve our sympathy in any real respect.  The deeply misogynistic undertone of THE LOFT is not assisted by the fact that all of the women characters presented within are less flesh and blood personas and are more sexually desirable trophies to be conquered. 

Horrendously backwards-minded attitudes towards its women characters notwithstanding, THE LOFT doesn’t really have anything truly compelling to say about male psychology either.  There could have been at least half-assed attempts here to dig deep into these deeply neurotic and deeply unsavory personalities, but the script lacks confidence in execution to the point where the fine actors are left with roles that feel kind of feebly cobbled together.  Any desire to dive into their respective back-stories – which could tip off their potential guilt or innocence – is superfluous at best.  There’s also very little, if any, bromantic chemistry between all of the performers as a whole.  The only things that most of them share in common are their shared desire to have sex with women outside of marriage…and to not get caught.  Even in would-be dynamic confrontations between various characters accusing each other of culpability, THE LOFT barely has a pulse of interest or intrigue.  Karl Urban, for example, is a likeable and charismatic on-screen presence, but here he comes off as a victim of shoddy screenplay maneuvering.  We rarely get an impression of what makes this guy – or any of the other guys in his posse – tick. 

Then , of course, there’s the whole question of this film existing in the first place.  Was there a justifiable reason for THE LOFT to be remade with an American cast by the same director as its predecessor?  Was there a hunger for this material to be revisited again?  Having never seen the Dutch original, commenting on this question any further is difficult.  There are kernels on compelling material here in some dosages, but it nevertheless left me longing for what a real maestro of scripting and dialogue could have done with it (imagine what a Quentin Tarrantino – a man that lives to make undesirable men come desirably alive  – could have done with this talk-heavy and stage play centric film).  The dialogue elicited here is so paper-thin and on-the-nose that you almost want to laugh at it out of pity.  The manner that everything coalesces towards its "shocking" conclusion left me yawning and checking for my watch for the time, neither of which are good signs during an murder mystery thriller.