REVIEW: DVD Release: Hotel

Film: Hotel
Release date: 9th August 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 83 mins
Director: Jessica Hausner
Starring: Franziska Weisz, Birgit Minichmayr, Marlene Streeruwitz, Rosa Waissnix, Christopher Scharf
Genre: Mystery/Thriller/Drama
Studio: Artificial Eye
Format: DVD
Country: Austria/Germany

Director Jessica Hausner’s fourth film follows the experiences of a young woman who comes to work at a quiet hotel in an isolated forest location. Her predecessor disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Will she fall victim of the same unknown fate?

A sense of unease pervades the hotel as Irene’s duties there commence with a tour of the building, beginning in the deserted basement, lit by flickering fluorescent lights in classic horror film style. Irene is young and inexperienced, away from home for the first time, and further isolated by having to live in a room in the hotel formerly inhabited by Eva, her ill-fated predecessor, while local employees live in the nearby town.

The staff at the hotel are oddly cold and unfriendly. The police make brief appearances, questioning staff regarding the disappearance of Eva, or dredging the pond in the grounds for evidence - although their actions are never elucidated, and the outcome of their investigations never explained.

Irene is further disturbed by a primitive doll displayed in a glass case at the hotel. This is apparently in reference to a local legend - the Lady of the Woods, a woman who lived in a cave nearby during the 16th century, healing the sick with her knowledge of herbs, until accused of sorcery and burnt at the stake. Irene dreams repeatedly of walking down a corridor in the hotel towards an unknown darkness. As hostility towards her among the staff increases, there is a growing sense of fear and menace, with the film’s inevitably dark conclusion almost coming as a relief from the accumulation of seemingly trivial yet disturbing incidents at the hotel…


The film’s location in a dark hotel in the woods is a classic setting for a conventional horror film, but Hotel produces something far more unexpected. A sense of unease builds through the film’s understated performances, sparse dialogue, austere aesthetics and evocation of alienation and isolation. It is shot with a stark colour palette – grey, white, brown, black, forest green and terracotta. The banal ugliness of the hotel’s interior creates a feeling of unhomeliness, the failure of its polyester attempts at cosiness only highlighting the unsettling inhumanity of such a place. Even more disturbingly, the woods surrounding the hotel don’t evoke the peace and beauty of nature. Their unnaturally perpendicular and regular tree trunks are reminiscent of a stage set, claustrophobically artificial and darkly lit.

The careful use of sound in the film also contributes to a strong sense of loneliness. The silence of the building is broken only by harsh, everyday noises – the creaking of the manager’s shoes, a key turning in a lock, the tinny kitsch of elevator muzak. Irene’s dreams are pervaded by a noise like radio interference, which cuts to the muted whine of the hotel alarm. In the woods, there is a humming sound but its source – a plane? running water? – is not identified, increasing the sense of unease. The failure of dialogue to produce any understanding or warmth only emphasises the insurmountable silence. Conversations are perfunctory or hostile. Irene has a date with a man from the local town, but, during their brief conversation, he misunderstands a question she asks him, his self-satisfied smile emphasising the lack of empathy between them. He spends the night with her, but this just seems to be a further failed attempt by Irene to make an emotional connection with anyone in the film.

Much of the success of the film hangs on Franziska Weisz’s performance as Irene. She conveys an apprehension which is itself fearful of discovery and articulation, of being ridiculed or judged. Her subtly conveyed aura of profound unhappiness suggests the inevitability of a catastrophic fate – whether due to the cruelty of her colleagues, or to the possibility of supernatural dangers lying within or outside the hotel. The truculent sexuality of Birgit Minichmayr’s performance as the jealous colleague Petra provides a strong foil to Irene’s reticent nervousness.

There are obvious parallels with two other horror films. The dark corridors of the hotel, leading to who knows what fearful places, are reminiscent of The Shining, while the legend of the witch in the woods, associated with the disappearance of a hiking party decades earlier, has echoes of The Blair Witch Project. Enjoyable as Jack Nicholson playing psychotic may be, Hotel is a far more understated matter than either of those films. There is no darkly melodramatic dialogue hinting at Eva’s fate, or horrors revealed hidden behind basement doors. The only “scream” moment is a silent one, all the more effective for its suggestion of the paralysis of a scream in a nightmare. Director Jessica Hausner has said that the type of horror films which feature monsters provide a form of relief for the audience, as they give fear a face; her aim in Hotel, instead, was to explore the essence of fear itself.

What Hotel successfully creates is that sense of what Freud called the “unheimlich” or “unhomely” – the uncanny nature of that which is familiar to us, yet subtly, disturbingly out of kilter. The setting of the hotel is banal and everyday, yet disconsonant elements accumulate. The absent Eva acts as a double to Irene – even her discarded glasses fit when Irene tries them on – and her disappearance calls into question the reality of Irene’s existence as an individual, and the possibility that that existence can be allowed to continue. The film raises questions which are never answered. Is the disappearance of Irene’s necklace and the smashing of her glasses an act of human malice, or is there a supernatural influence emanating from the woods? Do Irene’s dreams of the hotel corridor prefigure some horrific revelation yet to come? If so, why is there a sense of calmness and relief when she walks into the darkness waiting at the end of the corridor? The final image of Irene in her red uniform dwarfed by the black woods is a powerful one, echoing the primitive fear of fairytales, a modern day Little Red Riding Hood entering the Germanic forest.


The film’s atmosphere is cleverly and coherently constructed through its stark and minimal aesthetics, understated performances and sparse dialogue. Although it may be billed as a horror, it’s the antithesis of cheesy or gory examples of that genre, while some viewers may find its open ended conclusion frustrating. A strangely gripping and artful story, subtly horrific in its depiction of human isolation. KR