Unhinged R-Rated 2000s Thriller With Stacked Cast Is The Strangest Film You’ve Never Seen

By Robert Scucci
| Published 19 seconds ago

There’s one album that will forever be my white whale, and it’s Captain Beefheart’s 1969 disasterpiece, Trout Mask Replica. It’s one of those albums that’s considered unlistenable garbage or the work of a complete genius, depending on who you ask. It blends genres, polyrhythms, polytones, and whether you like it or not, it’s considered one of the most challenging records in 20th century music. I agree with this assessment because there’s so much going on that either Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart himself) secretly knows something nobody else does and he’s trying to speak to us through code, or he’s certifiably off his rocker. Maybe he was both.

This is all to say that I think I found the cinematic equivalent of Trout Mask Replica, and it comes in the form of 2001’s Hotel, a film that forces you to find meaning through the talent involved. The ensemble cast includes, but is not limited to, John Malkovich, David Schwimmer, Salma Hayek, Rhys Ifans, Burt Reynolds, and Lucy Liu, and their performances are all frenetic, unhinged, and absolutely wild.

The movie itself is set almost entirely in or around the titular hotel in Venice, Italy, and the plot increases in complexity because we’re pretty much seeing everything from the perspective of the hotel. Think of it like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but if it were an avant-garde jazz album performed by musicians who only caught a brief glimpse of the chord chart after it was set on fire and blasted with a high-pressure fire hose.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Like the Beefheart album, I don’t really have an answer. I’m glad art like this exists because sometimes you just need it to take a leap, and for writer-directors like Mike Figgis to come up with something so unhinged that its influence will be felt long after it’s forgotten.

Several Movies In One, But They’re All Incomplete

Unpacking the plot to Hotel is no easy feat, but I’ll break it down to its barest components for the sake of brevity. While staying at the Venice hotel with his film crew, writer-director Trent Stoken (Rhys Ifans) constantly butts heads with his overbearing producer Jonathan Danderfine (David Schwimmer). They’re filming an adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi, and their production is rife with issues, ranging from talent refusing to stick to the script to heavy implications that Trent has a bit of a drinking problem. At least I can’t think of any other reason why Jonathan demands to smell his breath whenever he arrives late to the set.

After a freak accident involving Trent getting shot in the spine, with no exit wound or bullet ever found, the writer-director falls into a coma, forcing Jonathan to helm the film even though he has no talent beyond wearing a bunch of rings and looking like a henchman from a straight-to-VHS action thriller.

Meanwhile, documentarian Charlee Boux (Salma Hayek), whose initial project was capturing behind-the-scenes footage of the movie, finds a much more compelling story demanding her attention: the hotel staff are cannibals, storing human meat in their walk-in coolers. The film’s opening sequence features John Malkovich’s Omar Johnson checking into the same hotel and slowly realizing the meal he’s eating is probably made of people. The fact that we never see him again after this scene suggests whoever’s staying at the hotel probably already ate him, or he’s at least marinating at one of the prep stations.

There’s so much more going on in Hotel, but unpacking everything here would be an exercise in futility. The plots all intersect at one point or another, but they’re not always supposed to, as far as I can tell. Instead, it feels like we’re getting a slice-of-life presentation through different mediums and guests as they come and go from their private spaces to the public ones they’re obligated to occupy.

Roger Ebert Compared It To Jazz Improv

When commenting on Hotel, Roger Ebert said, “It reminds me above all of a competitive series of jazz improvisations, in which the musicians quote from many sources and the joy comes in the way they’re able to keep their many styles alive in the same song.”

I wholeheartedly agree with Ebert’s assessment, which is why I opened this review bloviating about Captain Beefheart (It’s not a mid-life crisis, I swear!). For a film this weird and obscure to not even have a critical or audience score on Rotten Tomatoes despite its star power, my takeaway is that this whole thing is a disjointed mess by design.

Oftentimes we see four perspectives on screen at the same time, like you’re playing a multiplayer video game, with each window unfolding in a different location. Other times, we get anywhere from two to four perspectives, but they’re all following the same person or group from different angles, as if to make you wonder whether there’s something just over somebody’s shoulder you should be paying attention to.

My favorite part about Hotel is how it changes aspect ratio as a visual shorthand to let you know who’s in control of the narrative. We get a lot of split-screen footage when they’re working on The Duchess of Malfi, a tight square whenever we see what Charlee’s looking at, and so on. In many cases, these perspectives overlap, making me think this hotel has the same kind of power as the Overlook did in The Shining.

Hotel isn’t a story about a bunch of people trying to make a movie in Italy. In fact, it hardly tells a story at all. What we’re witnessing, though, isn’t insignificant. It’s an exercise in shifting perspective and showing how chaotic life becomes when it doesn’t stick to the script. Visually, you can see its influence in music videos, with Blink-182’s “Always” being the most well-known example that comes to mind. There’s plenty more where that came from, though.  

Listen, you may not appreciate what Hotel is trying to accomplish at face value, but if you decide to fire this one up on Tubi, where it’s streaming for free, I want you to think about what it actually does, and where else you’ve seen its influence over the last 25 years. You might be surprised.