While wandering the horror aisle at my local video rental place with a friend, we stumbled upon Across the Hall purely as the result of browsing alphabetically. We love the late Brittany Murphy around here, and she looked gorgeous on the DVD cover, so we decided to give this one a shot. As it turns out, this 2009 feature was the last project of Murphy’s to be released before her death. Unfortunately, it’s not very good. First and foremost, it’s not a horror film. The distinction between horror and thriller is one that can be debated (as my friend and I did after watching this movie, even though we both agreed that it was mislabeled), but this is a pretty clear example of a late-stage erotic thriller, in which an unfaithful person and the character with whom they’ve been cheating both get an unhappy ending. I’m getting a little ahead of myself, but this film is also told in anachronic order, so we know that there’s going to be a body in the hotel room from the moment that the film starts rolling, as a character known only as The Porter (Brad Greenquist) examines the taped outline of where a body slowly bled out. 

June (Murphy) is engaged to Terry (Danny Pino), but we meet her as she checks into a formerly swanky hotel. Terry calls his best friend Julian (Mike Vogel) to tell him that June’s flight was cancelled and the airline called the house. Upon learning that she was no longer going out of town for business, Terry followed her and tracked her to the hotel where he presumes she’s meeting a lover. He also confesses that he stopped at Julian’s place first, and has the latter’s gun. Julian tries to calm Terry down, and promises to be there soon. At some point later, Julian enters a hotel room, where he finds Terry holding a bound and blindfolded man at gunpoint while an unknown body rapidly cools on the ground. Elsewhere in the hotel, Julian’s sometime flame Anna (Natalie Smyka) is trying desperately to ignore the strange behavior she saw Julian exhibit earlier in the evening. Of course, then we zoom around in time a bit and learn the truth, which anyone who has seen a movie before already assumed, which is that the man with whom June has been cheating on Terry is Julian. (If you watched this on a streaming service, you also probably already saw a thumbnail of June and Julian kissing, so nice going on that one, interface devs.) Most of the film then becomes about watching Julian as he tries to prevent the inevitable violence from occurring and—when it becomes too late to stop what’s been set in motion—attempt to extricate himself from the situation without additional death, revealing his affair with June to the dangerous Terry, or legal repercussions in her death. 

There were a few interesting directions in which this could have gone. Firstly, my friend and I were of the opinion that Terry was manipulating everything, that he had already caught June and Julian in the act and had merely arranged all of this in order to kill June and have Julian take the fall for it. The clues that hinted at this were the fact that Terry got Julian’s gun specifically to confront his fiance and her lover, and that Terry was utterly insistent that Terry come and meet him at the hotel. Ultimately, Julian does end up as the fall guy, but that wasn’t Terry’s plan from the beginning, it was just a scheme that he improvised when he realized Julian was the one cuckolding him. Frankly, the planted evidence of Terry calling Julian’s cell phone, which he finds in the bedsheets of Anna’s room, and leaving a voicemail that implicates Julian as the one who’s been behaving aberrantly is flimsy at best. There’s no way that Julian is going to be convicted while Terry walks away, consequence free, despite the slow motion ending where he disappears into the crowd on the street, invisible in a hastily acquired bellhop’s uniform. This is where the audience is supposed to have their “ah-ha!” moment and marvel at Terry’s apparent masterminding, but that’s not the story that’s been told up to this point. The film simply doesn’t come together into a cohesive whole. 

That’s not to say that the individual parts aren’t praiseworthy. Although the tone and editing undermine the ending, the film is systemically tight and well constructed, even if it’s apparent that this was a script that came together under pressure to be twisty and turny rather than to have convincing dialogue. There are several very convincing misdirects, with one of the most effective being that we watch Julian as he takes two separate baths; this doesn’t become clear until later in the film, when we realize that we saw him enter his apartment bathroom earlier in the timeline, take a bath in the hotel later in the timeline, then go into the hotel bathroom to start that second bath, chronologically between those two events but placed later. It’s good stuff, and for all the things that one could conceivably complain about here, getting to watch Mike Vogel strut around in naught but a towel several times isn’t one of them. It’s also worth noting that the film is visually sumptuous, gorgeous even. A decade and a half later, you could only hope that a bargain budgeted wannabe noir like this one would look a quarter as beautiful. I had a vision of what this would look like as a 2026 production while watching the film, and it was all white and beige boxes for hotel rooms, lit flatly, cleanly, and boringly. There used to be half a dozen movies like this every year — experiments in style that might not be perfect but would be mostly considered serviceable. Instead, you end up with something like How to Make a Killing, where the budget is out of control and everything looks like it was filmed in an AirBnB. 

Perhaps the greatest crime that Across the Hall commits is that it truly underutilizes Brittany Murphy. She spends half of her screentime as a corpse, and even if that weren’t macabre in light of her real life death being so close at hand, it would still be an utter waste of a talent. What little she is given to do is good. When she confesses to Julian that she’s been fooling around with him because she needed to know for sure that the love she felt for Terry was really her own and not merely a reflection of his unflinching love for her reflecting back at him, she really sells the sweetness and softness of that moment. It’s too bad that it’s locked up in this movie, an overall experience that’s really not worth writing home about.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond