Culled up from the dingiest crevices of one’s subconscious like the scraps of a sunken barge hauled out of the ocean’s trenches, Hotel Poseidon arrives at Fantasia International a mold and muck-ridden disasterpiece of nightmare cinema. Like the most unkempt corners of the unfettered and id-driven imagination from which it appears to have sprung, it is vile, demented, and maybe a little beguiling. But make no mistake: it is also a very difficult experience to put to paper.

To an extent, the film concerns Dave (Tom Vermier), the brow-beaten and disillusioned inheritor/caretaker of the eponymous hotel, who is as much a picture of mental well-being and good hygiene as his place of work is a five-star accommodation. His “Hotel Poseidon” is a building that sits somewhere between a completely derelict flophouse and a crack den, a putrid ruin teeming with mounds of spoiled food, murky puddles that have pooled from burst pipes, and faulty appliances always shooting sparks. The film’s production design, exhaustive in that it assures no inch of surface is left unsoiled, helps the building transmogrify into a character itself. A refrain of harsh metallic shudders from behind the walls of the building even let the hotel speak. Apt choices in colour grading and lighting drench each frame in a suitably oppressive atmosphere of queasiness and stagnancy.

Because Dave and every other maudlin character that comes to inhabit the hotel are very much reflections—or, manifestations—of the film’s single setting, so too do they inherit disheveled, colour-muted clothes, and perpetually downtrodden or ghastly expressions to echo their environment. In director Stef Lernous’ world, everyone also has a face smeared with a sickly off-white paint, making them look like the players in a Roy Andersson film who somehow ended up in the Neitherworld waiting room from Beetlejuice. Lernous has a pedigree as a theatre director, and so Hotel Poseidon is rife with lugubrious performances of characters that seem curiously conscious of their roles. The camerawork, meanwhile, really explores the story space in order to highlight the extensive work done by the production team and immerse you in Lernous’ diegesis of decay.

There is an extended scene in this film, what some might call the film’s centrepiece, in which we follow Dave as a he pinballs around an unwelcome party that springs up in his hotel. The scene puts Lernous’ eye for blocking on full display, his camera plunging audiences into a distressing series of nonsensical and chaotic interactions with a phantasmagoric parade of the unseemly figures in Dave’s life. The scene feels like being in a crowded room when the drugs take hold in the wrong way; or, more generally, like losing control. And this ultimately is where Hotel Poseidon will make or lose its crowd; its commitment to puppeteering such a disorienting swirl of miasmic elements can be incredibly hard to stomach, as well as maddening in its abstractions. But there is an unquestionable amount of craft and innovation on display throughout, as well as imagery that overflows and envelopes and seeps its way into your mind.

The film is not soothing to sit through by any stretch of the imagination, but for those who recognize that film dreams, like our own, can collect the sordid and the obscene, and for those daring to sift through the detritus in search of some crystalline truth, then this hotel is worth at least a one night’s stay. Sometimes just to wake up is to feel flummoxed – and maybe that’s the point. Just make sure you have a shower or a bath waiting for you when you do.

DIRECTOR

Stef Lernous

WRITER

Stef Lernous

CAST

Ruth Becquart, Steve Geerts, Anneke Sluiters, Tine Van den Wyngaert, Dominique Van Malder, Tom Vermeir

PRODUCER

Nick Kaldunski

CONTACT

Abattoir Fermé