Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
A couple works hard to renovate their dream house and become landlords to pay for it. Unfortunately one of their tenants has plans of his own.
Pacific Heights is a competent early-90s thriller with a solid premise about homeownership turned nightmare. The plot is effectively tense in its first two acts, exploiting real anxieties about tenant rights and property law in a clever way, but it becomes increasingly conventional as it escalates toward standard thriller territory. Michael Keaton delivers a genuinely unnerving, charismatic performance as the psychopathic tenant, while Melanie Griffith and Matthew Modine are serviceable if unremarkable leads. Cinematography is professionally handled with good use of San Francisco locations but nothing visually distinctive. The concept of weaponizing landlord-tenant law as a thriller mechanism had some freshness at the time, but the overall execution follows familiar genre beats. The ending abandons the film's most interesting tension — the legal and psychological warfare — in favor of a more conventional, slightly unsatisfying revenge conclusion that deflates much of what made the first half compelling.