So she takes on a job in the bayou, caring for an old man who's had a stroke recently that has left him completely paralysed. Or so says the old battle horse of a wife who runs her house and her husband in the old 'Southern style', and looks down on an 'outsider' whom she feels 'won't understand our ways, and won't understand the house'.

The young New Orleans lawyer, straight out of a John Grisham novel, is persuasive enough to keep the young nurse on the job despite the grumbling old battle axe, and the old lady from getting too pesky, while flirting a bit with the young nurse himself.

Her friend in the city worries that she's spending her best years with old dying people and that it's changing her, but young nurse needs to work out her own emotional issues and guilt over not being around when her father died prematurely. 'Nobody should have to die alone' is her reason for sticking it out in the Louisiana swamps, and you admire her for it.

Just don't admire her too much, or fall in love with her, because this is Southern Gothic. Where, in the best tradition of Carson McCullers, Greg Iles, and a whole bunch of Mississippi masters, old and new, everything does not always turn out well in the end, someone usually dies--or worse, and the good guys don't win.

I won't give away the barb in the tail of this film, in the event you haven't caught it a local multiplex in your town yet. But I will tell you that it involves a terrible secret the house holds close to her wooden breast.

A secret involving two African-American servants with the typically turn-of-20-century Southern Gothic names of Papa Justify and Mama Cecile, who were lynched and burned in front of this very house for initiating the two young children of the house into the macabre rituals of hoodoo. (Not to be confused with hoodoo--and if you watch the film, it'll tell you briefly what hoodoo is and how it differs from voodoo.)

And it also involves sacrifices--but, as the Gena Rowlands character says in the end, people always take it for granted that sacrifice involves killing someone. And that isn't necessarily true.

I guess I could pick holes in Skeleton Key. It's full of cliches--creaking staircases, sagging porches, shadows flitting about an old house, locked doors that clatter incessantly as if something behind them wants out, mist-laden swamps, the gothic staples of storm and thundershowers, a young defenseless (unarmed and naive) female protagonist...basically the whole waterworks.