Hotel
Newly restored in 4k and available for the first time in North America, Austrian auteur Jessica Hausner radically upends genre tropes and preempts the resurgence of folk horror with her second and most formally audacious feature, HOTEL. The deceptively simple premise of a young woman who takes on a job as a night porter at a remote Austrian hotel and encounters unexplained phenomena amounts to a grand treatise on the inhibiting potential of imagination, the fine line between banality and terror and the looming specter of fate.
Allusions to local myth, mysterious disappearances and haunted forests eschew generic conclusions and serve to illustrate and complicate the inner life of a young woman reckoning with the essential ambiguities of defining one’s life. “An intelligent fable about fear and desire,” (Time Out) Hausner’s sophomore feature is a haunting metaphysical horror film unlike any other.
Cast
- Franziska Weisz
- Birgit Minichmayr
- Marlene Streeruwitz
- Rosa Waissnix
- Christopher Schärf
Blu-ray Features
Audio commentary by director Jessica Hausner
Discs: 1
- "This is a haunting film about labor, obedience, the invisible presence of passive-aggressiveness as a form of violence, and that odd, intangible spirit of being aware that other people long gone once worked where you now work - that intangible presence of workplace ghosts."
- "Hotel succeeds in bringing a distinctive sense of menace behind every shadow and closed door, burrowing into the deepest realms of our subconscious and making us think twice about our next hotel booking, lest it be our last."
- "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."
- "[A] creepy and effective supernatural thriller. "
- "Hausner’s forays into psychological horror mine the genre’s suspense and creeping disquiet in service to her vision of an irreducibly inexplicable universe, in which strangeness makes incursions into the safety of familiarity, and nobody can ever be known fully. "
- "Austrian director Jessica Hausner's nerve-jangling psychological horror combines the darkness of countryman Michael Haneke, Tarkovsky-esque static shots and the supernatural suggestiveness of Picnic at Hanging Rock."
Awards & Recognition
Grand Prize
Diagonale, Austria
Grand Prize of European Fantasy Film
Leeds Int'l. Film Festival
Un Certain Regard Award
Cannes Film Festival
Karlovy Vary Int'l. Film Festival
Toronto Int'l. Film Festival
BFI London Film Festival
Mar del Plata Film Festival
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