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As written by husband-and-wife duo Vern Thiessen and Susie Moloney, Vertigo’s season opener The Lodger is more a fox-in-the-henhouse thriller than it is a whodunit.

Based on Marie Belloc Lowndes’ 1911 novel and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent film version of it, The Lodger tells the story of a couple struggling to pay their mortgage who then take in a lodger. Soon, the wife, Ellen, fears Laurence Moore, the mysterious man living in their attic room, might just be the serial killer terrorizing their city. The audience deduces this long before Ellen does, though Thiessen and Moloney take great pains trying to shift suspicion to Ellen’s boorish husband Bill.

Thiessen and Moloney would have been wiser to start Ellen and Moore’s dance macabre much sooner than the last third of the play. They should have given Moore many more ironic lines, such as when he tells Bill’s younger sister they will see each other again. The audience knows what he means, and there is a chilling ripple effect in the theatre. There is equally great recognition from the audience when Ellen can’t find her kitchen knife, and Moore assures her it will turn up soon. It’s great fun for an audience to know more than the characters. There are also great chances for suspense whenever Ellen goes into Moore’s room because we never know if he’s in the bathroom or off somewhere in the city.

Lauren Brotman does much of the heavy lifting in this domestic thriller, but she does so with ease. It never feels as if she is not in complete control, even though the script demands many emotional switches, especially when it comes to dealing with her erratic, and abusive, husband, played with almost Neanderthal glee by David Haysom. This is a play about the worst of gender dynamics. Bill is a powder keg of seething alpha testosterone. Ellen has learned to use sex to control his need to feel in control. When Moore enters the picture, we see the worst in Bill surface, which certainly helps define Bill as the killer.

The scenes between Ellen and Bill, whether they are bickering or being sexual, seem completely natural, and that makes them all the more scary, because we accept them as real people, caught in real emotions. Bill is like some ’70s version of Stanley Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire. Moore says he studies human emotions, so the script should have him overtly spying on Ellen and Bill, so we understand how he is able to manipulate situations. The short scenes between Bill and Moore, who is played by Tyrell Crews, are fraught with potential danger because, in Bill’s eyes, Moore is everything Bill is not.

Grace Fedorchuk plays Daisy, Bill’s younger sister, who is visiting so she can check out the college in the city. She is that annoying but necessary character who places herself in danger because of her innocence. The idea that youth is wasted on the young certainly applies in this situation. We know Moore sees her as a potential victim, and we just want to warn her at every chance, and it is up to playwrights Thiessen and Moloney to put her in even greater danger. Once is not enough to have her be the mouse to Moore’s cat.

Norma Lewis plays Ellen’s childhood friend, Joannie Buffie, a young female cop, who gives us another view of femininity. She is much stronger, and a much greater threat to Bill and Moore, than either Ellen or Daisy.

Thiessen and Moloney have made Moore a British man, probably to emphasize Lowndes’ original intention to use Jack the Ripper as her model for the man upstairs. Moore gets slimier and creepier as the play progresses, and that’s when things really begin to crackle. He needs to show his true nature a lot sooner if we are going to have maximum thrills, chills, and fun.

Director Jack Ginhaus is having fun, and it shows. The first time a victim is slashed, he stages it as a real jump scare so that the four or five times another woman is in danger, we are waiting for a similar shock. They don’t come, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t more than a little unsettled.

Once again, Scott Reid’s set looks completely livable, but this time it’s not somewhere we’d like to settle. Narda McCarroll’s lighting makes each of the rooms come alive when needed and disappear when they are not. MJ Dandeneau’s sound design is hair-raisingly masterful. John Iglesias’ costumes really establish who these people are, which is especially true of Bill’s T-shirt.

The Lodger is lumbered with too many episodic scenes, so it sputters along until a longer scene arrives. It feels a little too much as if it is still a film and not a play, but it has been given such an excellent production by the folks at Vertigo that it works better than it would have given a lesser staging.

The Lodger runs until Oct. 25 at the theatre at the base of the Calgary Tower, #161, 115 9th Ave. S.E.