Jessica Hausner is an acquired taste. Her films are often dry and deliberately stagnant, forcing the audience to lean in and pay attention because the emotional core is often elusive, hiding in the dark, attainable if you’re willing to let it consume you. As her singular directing credit in the horror genre, Hotel is a film that is constantly asking its audience to anticipate the worst, drawing on their expectations of the genre, and then undercutting them by insisting that the all-encompassing isolation of a new job is far more terrifying than the possibility of a murderer stalking the grounds.
Irene (Franziska Weisz) takes on a new position at a hotel in the Austrian Alps, seemingly self-contained in the middle of the woods. As she goes about her work, confronted with abrasive guests and unfriendly coworkers, she discovers that the woman who had her job before her vanished without a trace. With no clarity from those around her and no one really caring about this disappearance, she is confronted with a realisation: would anyone care if she disappeared too?
In recent years, the term ‘elevated horror’ has been both coined and then disparaged by horror fans and critics alike, due to the perspective that this term is an assertion from auteur filmmakers that horror needs ‘saving’ from its lowly depths and that only they can shaped it into a genre worth taking seriously. Unfortunately, ‘elevated horror’, negative connotations and all, has been applied (both currently and retroactively) to any kind of horror film that chooses to use form deliberately and, as a result, tends to stifle conversations about what horror is even for.
Hotel is very much a film where nothing happens. Despite the trappings of anticipation, there is nothing tangible about the horrors. Oftentimes, it feels like an articulation of the ineffable, like trying to explain to someone why something scared you after the fact, only to have it sound childish and inarticulate, unable to convey the very real fear you experienced. The isolation of being unable to make new coworkers like you and the dread of menial labour with very little pay attached will not be scary to everyone and in terms of traditional horror, the lack of an actual killer is a flaw. But there is something so specific and so stomach churning about the repetition of the film, about the empty spaces consumed with darkness, and the inability to find catharsis in the ending.
Much has been said on the internet about liminality, to the point where it has taken on its own subculture and fandom on the internet, with people posting pictures of creepy, dark, empty spaces and referring to them as ‘liminal’. Literally, the word means an in-between state, an incredibly pertinent word for the horror genre as it can refer to a state of being (see: vampires as both dead and alive) as well as a physical space.
Hotels are liminal. They resemble a pseudo-‘home’, a place where you sleep and eat and relax. But they aren’t where you live. You would really only stay there if you were on holiday and the worst of them aren’t even for that. In the same way, your first few days in a new job can be liminal. The in-between state of being a new employee, where you don’t know anyone and have yet to assimilate into a routine is awkward at best and quite terrifying at worst, because there’s no certainty that you’ll be treated well, that you’ll be paid well, that you’ll even be able to do the job, that what was written in the job description is what you’ll actually end up doing.
The labour in the film is presented as pointless, unappreciated and tedious. Despite this, Hotel is not a film where the protagonist distracts herself from her job with a vivid imagination. Rather, because the events of the film are so ordinary and it is instead the filmmaking that creates the horror, she is only allowed to be scared of her own reality – that this could be a lifelong profession. With no other genre convention to blame, she is forced into fearing her own choice to go there in the first place, or even more chilling, her choice to stay.
Hausner seems to know that the audience is expecting something more tangibly horrific. The legacy of The Shining haunts every horror film set in an isolated location, and this can be an advantage to some filmmakers and a detriment to most others, often being overshadowed by its comparisons to the singular Kubrick classic.
This film asks that the audience already understands and is willing to relinquish their desire to have something more outrageous or possibly more profound happen on screen than what we are presented with, almost revelling in its stubbornness when it comes to defining its source of fear. What is understood in the filmmaking is that subjectivity and reverence towards people who aren’t viewed as important or worth focusing our attention on is essential to the genre, regardless of whether we understand it or not.
When Irene wanders into the woods at the end of the film, we are left unsure of what happens to her. All that we hear is a scream, the residual sound of anguish, fear, death, haunting a world marred by indifference. It is simultaneously true that she was very suddenly murdered and no one cared, and that she survived the end of the film, her scream simply an exorcism of her repressed frustrations. And no one cared. She simply got back to work.
by Amber Walker
Amber Walker (@ambercanwalk on Twitter) is a writer working out of the UK and is currently maintaining a film blog, with the hope of becoming a full time writer. She has previously been published in Gayly Dreadful and Unpublished Zine.
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