Hotel

Writer/director Jessica Hausner scored a notable art-house hit with Lourdes in 2009, but her 2004 psychological horror film Hotel is a frustratingly unrecognized exercise in mystery and tension that lands somewhere between David Lynch and The Shining. There’s something about hotels that makes for great cinema, a shared space that aims for character and style, but somehow they end up making you wonder what unnatural acts have taken place in their rooms and corridors…

Irene (Franzisca Weisz) gets a job at a remote hotel in the Austrian Alps, and is disturbed to hear a local legend of a forest witch; there’s a puppet of the witch kept in a glass display in the hotel lobby which adds to her disquiet. Irene goes about her duties, cleaning, swimming and taking advantage of the voluminous space, but there’s a growing feeling of unease as she traverses the dark corridors…

Hausner creates an above-average exercise in suspense with Hotel, which plays on our fears of communal spaces and, while remaining ambiguous, never steps into the realm of special effects, gore or rubber monsters. Irene accepts her place in society, which is somewhat servile, but that doesn’t mean that she’s not vulnerable to a potential attack, and even if that attack doesn’t instantly materialise, the suspicion that the hotel is more than it seems prevails…

Although it’s possible to catch this on streaming, I saw Hotel back in 2004 at the Cannes Film Festival, and it’s stuck firmly in my mind; every time I enter a hotel, I find myself getting flashbacks to Irene wandering the corridors with the gloom barely providing cover for whatever it is that lies just beyond her field of vision. Fans of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock will understand the particular niche sub-genre that Hotel explores; not much happens, but the way it doesn’t happen is often absolutely nerve-shredding.