This impressively lean shocker from the director of Kontroll, a Hungarian film of some note, begins with - if you'll pardon the phrase - a premise to die for, writes Donald Clarke

After encountering car trouble, a couple is forced to stay in a remote motel run by a nervous young man (who will remind viewers of the proprietor of a similar establishment in another film). While improvising ways to avoid touching the filthy furniture in the horrid room, the bickering lovers are disturbed by banging noises next door.

But there are no guests in the adjoining room. Then, unnerved by the oddness, they discover a series of videos depicting brutal murders that look a little too convincing to be staged.

Doesn't that bedspread in the film look similar? Yes, the murderers, participants in snuff cinema, carried out the crimes in this very room and they're on their way to start shooting their next film.

This is the stuff of high pulp, and Nimród Antal, an enthusiast for tight closeups and unsettling noises, is to be commended for imposing discipline on the furious action and delaying the inevitable drift into absurdity for as long as could reasonably be hoped. Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale, stars of only modest luminescence, are ideally cut out for the task of fleeing men with hatchets, and the picture knows how to combine rats with tunnels to maximum effect.

Vacancy does, sadly, impose an ending so abrupt and enigmatic it would look out of place in a downtown experimental art video, and the conspicuous reminders of that other motel classic do point up its crudity. But, in an age where shoving a spike through a nude woman's eyeball is considered the height of groovy hilarity, Antal's tense little programmer offers an invigorating blast of good, old-fashioned schlock. Recommended.