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A troubled, soon-to-be-divorced couple (Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale), stumble into one of those urban legend-ish tales that are always befalling city slickers when they drive off the main road, when their car breaks down, forcing them to spend the night in a scungy hotel that has an extremely dark secret.

Although it succumbs to last-act lapses in logic, a back-story tragedy for its central couple that’s clumsily employed and explored, and that common syndrome where utterly human villains start charging around like mindless, unstoppable zombies, Vacancy, whilst inferior to Brian Bertino’s similar The Strangers, is still an effective and gripping chiller in its own right.

The plotting is nothing special, but director Nimrod Antal’s handling has grace and power, from noting a disarming poetry in a sparkler’s shower of light, to the thunderous hide-and-seek action, exploiting the siege situation for all it’s worth. Beckinsale’s as dull a screen presence as ever, but Frank Whaley offers a delicious performance as an evil Ned Flanders, and Wilson’s unexpectedly effective job, as a wounded husband who’s both cleverer than the usual run of screen psycho-bait but not quite as clever as he needs to be, helps sustain a refreshingly minimalist contemporary horror film.