Hotel

Writer-director Jessica Hausner's fourth film, Hotel (2004), is a chilly thriller that evokes comparisons with movies from fellow-Austrian Michael Haneke, Denmark's Lars von Trier and Hitchcock in humour-less mode. Technically, it's above par, highlighting natural and available sounds (banishing any additional soundtrack music, but finding valid excuses to include musical moments). It also uses available light well; (starkly so, almost suggesting the movie should have been shot in black and white). Dramatically, however, the movie bombs.

The central character, Irene (Franziska Weisz, an actress and King's College master's degree holder in development and environment), is a newly-hired live-in receptionist living at an old-fashioned hotel deep in Austrian pine forest. The girl she replaced, and closely resembles, had vanished suddenly, and other hotel staff are eerily watchful and edgy.

Local history tells of a 16th-Century witch who was burned to death: the Lady of the Woods is a bogeywoman, but the screenplay understates her presence. Irene is taken to see her legendary cave by a young artist she meets at a disco. Kisses lead to him staying a night in her hotel room, but do not lead anywhere in the plot and her or his character development.

Other red herrings or loose ends hang around the sombre hotel and surrounding forest, which seems to lure Irene into staring at it and walking through it many times without any explanation. Some of her hotel colleagues pray, tell lies, eye her suspiciously, and two detectives pass through the lobby to conduct unseen interviews. Irene swims in the hotel pool in off-duty hours, and smokes outside a locked basement door.

And then the official Artificial Eye DVD ended, abruptly, inexplicably, after its advertised 73 minutes. The movie lasted 83 or 86 minutes when it appeared at European film festivals; it was impossible to care what had been excised, and why. A short story with a lot of potential had become a short film without any meaning.