Then, a few days later, they have dinner. It’s lovely and they stare longingly at each other and then he leaves, but she follows him into the hall and, wordlessly, he knows what she wants. He goes back into her apartment and they start to make out… and the movie rewinds back to the beginning, showing us events from his perspective. We realize that he spotted her at the hospital one day and inserted himself into her life, offering her the apartment to draw her close… and then, we’re shown that he’s been watching her the whole time from the other side of the walls.

Because of course.

From there, the movie descends into madness. But, it’s not exciting enough madness to be worthwhile. It’s just repetitive. It gets late; she goes to bed; he comes out of the wall and sits there and stares at her. Sometimes he crawls under the bed and caresses the hand draped over the side of the bed. Sometimes he licks it. Sometimes he watches her shower, and sometimes he watches her take a bath, and sometimes he watches her as she’s cooking dinner. She starts to speak with her ex (the woefully underused Lee Pace) again, and soon he’s coming over for dinner, and Max watches that too, jealously. A few times he’s almost caught in bed with one of her dresses, or masturbating in her tub, but he always slips back behind the walls before he’s found out.

What frustrates me most about The Resident is that it wastes a great cast. Hilary Swank is a talented actress, and she does the best she can with the material here, but until the knock-down, drag-out fight that makes up the majority of the film’s final act, she doesn’t really have much to work with. Instead, the film just feels exploitative; she’s asked to walk around for a significant number of scenes wrapped in just a towel, jumping at noises and feeling like she’s being watched. She spends many of the other scenes laying passed-out in a bed, drugged, while Jeffrey Dean Morgan stares at her and caresses her body.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan, too, is an extremely charismatic actor. His work on The Good Wife proved that; just check out Kristen Warner and Kelli Marshall’s appreciation of Jason Crouse for evidence. They point to Crouse’s (i.e. Morgan’s) “commanding masculinity” and highlight his “glasses, hair, beard, and smile” as focus points for his attractiveness, noting that The Good Wife often frames him in “medium shots and close-ups, with lighting that almost always accentuates the qualities [they] cited above.” His character doesn’t wear glasses in The Resident, but the other three characteristics are all on full display, also often in medium shots and close-ups, lit in ways that in other movies would position him as a desirable romantic counterpart to Swank’s self-assured doctor.