Pied-à-terror: "The Resident"

So here's Hilary Swank, trying to put the critical and commercial crash-and-burn of Amelia behind her by attempting something notionally commercial - even if it is with material that suggests the notorious Sharon Stone bomb Sliver restructured for the Big Brother age. The Resident casts La Swank as Juliet Devereau, an emergency-ward nurse looking to put the failure of her latest relationship behind her by moving into a mahogany-hued apartment of her own, blessed with rent control and a spectacular view of the Brooklyn Bridge. The only apparent downside would appear to be the men around her: her ex (Lee Pace), who's taken to stalking our heroine through the city streets; her hunky, sometimes shifty landlord (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), forever fingering his toolbelt; and Morgan's creepy uncle - played, in a nod to producers Hammer's past, by Christopher Lee - who spends all his time peering round a two-inch crack in the door of the flat at the other end of the hallway.

From the attention the camera pays to Juliet's nightly bathing and moisturising routine, it's obvious she's under surveillance in more ways than one: "This place is driving me crazy!," she sighs to herself around the mid-point, and while what follows is far from another Repulsion, you do sort of get the idea. A feature debut for Finnish pop-promo director Antti Jokinen, The Resident isn't beyond clumsiness, electing to rewind events at the half-hour mark so as to make clear something everything bar the most bovine of teenagers in the audience will have already twigged. For most of its brisk 91 minutes, however, it plays as functioning hokum, playing up the more perverse aspects of its otherwise pared-back psychosexual premise in some very un-Hollywood ways: the hider-in-the-house emerges from under Swank's bed as she sleeps, so as to suck on her fingers, and will later come to drug her with insulin just to cop a feel.

After the regrettable haircut and mannerisms Amelia stuck her with, Swank, accordingly, is back to something like appealing form; it's good we get a grown woman, capable of suggesting accumulated psychological baggage, in a part that could very easily have gone to an Odette Yustman or Leighton Meester. The previously jobbing (and reliably resistable) Morgan finally arrives at the role he was born to play - a mouthbreather who obtains sexual frissons from an electric toothbrush - and it's aiming for an unusual demographic: women who live alone in the city - and pyjama party attendees who some day aspire to live alone in the city - whose worst fears involve a violation of their cherished personal space. Telling that the weirdo should finally be caught while raiding the heroine's closet, signalled as a breach too far; this is New York, after all, where nobody rumples another woman's dress and gets away with it.

The Resident opens nationwide tomorrow.