Plot
When a young doctor suspects she may not be alone in her new Brooklyn loft, she learns that her landlord has formed a frightening obsession with her.

Release Year: 2011

Rating: 5.2/10 (10,101 voted)

Director: Antti Jokinen

Stars: Hilary Swank, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Lee Pace

Storyline
In New York, Dr. Juliet Bliss Devereau of the Brooklyn General Hospital has ended her relationship with her boyfriend Jack and is seeking an apartment in Brooklyn to live alone. She finds a bargain in an old apartment building owned by the handsome and lonely Max and one night she misinterprets his signals and dates him. However she concludes that it is too soon to have a love affair and she asks Max to leave her apartment. However she does not know that Max is a deranged man obsessed on her and that he spies her from secret openings in her apartment. Further, Max is drugging Juliet every night and sexually abusing of her. Juliet has troubles to wake up in the morning to go to the hospital and decides to install a monitoring system in her apartment. She learns the truth about Max but how to escape from the insane landlord?

Writers: Antti Jokinen, Robert Orr

Cast:
Hilary Swank - Dr. Juliet Devereau
Jeffrey Dean Morgan - Max
Lee Pace - Jack
Christopher Lee - August
Aunjanue Ellis - Sydney
Sean Rosales - Carlos
Deborah Martinez - Mrs. Portes
Sheila Ivy Traister - ER Nurse (as Sheila Traister)
Michael Showers - August ER Doctor
Nana Visitor - Real Estate Agent
Arron Shiver - Architect
Michael Badalucco - Moving Man
Michael Massee - Security Tech
Penny Balfour - Drug Addict
Mark Morocco - ER Surgeon (as Mark Vincent Morocco)

Taglines: She Thought She Was Living Alone

Official Website: Official site |

Release Date: 24 February 2011

Filming Locations: Albuquerque Studios - 5650 University Boulevard SE, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

Box Office Details

Budget: $20,000,000 (estimated)

Runtime: 91 min

Trivia:
Some scenes, that were in the original script but weren't filmed during principal photography for budget reasons, were shot in April 2010.

Goofs:
Revealing mistakes: When Juliet calls the hospital to inform that she will be late (1:04.45h) she obviously doesn't talk to anybody, we see the locked screen of her iPhone with the typical "slide to unlock" screen. It's not possible to make a call while an iPhone is locked.

Quotes:
[first lines]
Juliet Devereau: [receiving ER patient] Okay. We're going to intubate this guy and fix the hole in his heart.

Yep, Men Are Just Plain Bad

Rating: 4/10

'The Resident' is a handsome looking thriller, with some really beautiful cinematography in particular (by Hellboy's Guillermo Navarro), & high production values in general. Unfortunately, that's about all that's going for it - there's nothing even remotely new or surprising on display in this film, nothing you won't have seen a hundred times before.

Hilary Swank is a young ER doctor who moves into a new apartment building in Brooklyn, owned by the charming & handsome Max, who we come to find is psychotically obsessed with her..

Yep, like I said, you see where this is going. Swank isn't called on to do anything much more than take her clothes off every once in awhile, which is a pity as she can be a fine actress, given the right role. Jeffrey Dean Morgan's performance as Max is delicate, erotic & actually quite moving early on, but he is at odds with the film he is appearing in, which simply wants him to be a generic cardboard cut-out psycho. There is no real attempt at explanation for Max's behaviour, & no empathy for him as a human being. His maleness is portrayed as a threat, & creepy simply by definition.

Christopher Lee is, as always, a welcome sight, but is wasted as a spooky 'Norma Bates' style parent with about 4½ minutes of screen time. The only other male in the film is Juliet's "asshole" ex-boyfriend Jack, who has even less screen-time than Lee, & if you've seen any of this genre of film before, you'll have a pretty good idea what he's for, what he does, & where he ends up.

This is a misandric movie because there are no ordinary men in it, only bad, psychotic or inadequate men. The woman, on the other hand, is portrayed as entirely good & a victim to boot. Which makes it no different from countless other films you've seen before, of course. But the point is, there will be countless more, if no-one ever stops to point it out.

I wish there was more to say. There's a couple of good shocks in there towards the end, & some nicely handled suspense but it just seems a pity to have wasted them on something so wholly unoriginal & ugly as this.

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