‘The Loft‘ could have been a special remake. Director Erik Van Looy crossed the ocean with the idea of his successful film ‘Loft‘ made in Belgium in 2008 and directed the American version himself, which was released in 2014. I did not see the original film, but the IMDB reviews and user comments indicate that this is another Americanized adaptation that fails to reconstruct the qualities of the production that inspired it. The film looks like a combination of a Hitchcock-like ‘whodunit’ with an erotic thriller, not completely devoid of cinematic qualities, but without enough emotion and suspense to justify the crossing of the ocean.
The starting point of the story is the same as in a few other European movies – a group of men, friends, all married in this case, lead libertine lives, sprinkled with extra-marital adventures. In this case, they buy a downtown apartment to bring here their casual relationships away from the eyes of the world and especially of their wives. Vice is to be paid for sooner or later, and the punishment appears in the form of the corpse of a murdered woman. As only the five of them know the secret of the apartment and as each of them has a key, the culprit is one of them. So we are in a version of the mysteries ‘whodunit’ in a closed room, like Agatha Christie, where everybody suspects everybody else, but the social ambiance is middle class plus and the setting is one of the large American cities.
The police intrigue is quite complicated, and it is revealed to us through the police investigation, the discussions between the five men and the flashbacks all these trigger. This could have been quite interesting, but here is the main problem of this production, in my opinion. There are too many characters, and the cast and interpretations do not differentiate them in many cases. It may be that the fact that director Erik Van Looy knows his characters so well has been an obstacle in clarifying them for viewers. As the film looks, I lost interest in the story, and worse, was confused as I had the feeling that many characters have at least one double (the immoral husbands, their mistresses, their wives, the corrupt businessmen, etc.). ‘The Loft‘ is well filmed, but despite the visual qualities it failed to engage or interest me.