History reduced to a trivial parlour game
Bad Times at the El Royale 15 cert, 141 min ★★★★★ Dir Drew Goddard
Starring Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Jon Hamm, Dakota Johnson, Lewis Pullman, Cailee Spaeny, Chris Hemsworth, Nick Offerman
Horror films have been known to get a little postmodern – but for sheer meta-flamboyance, few can match Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods, which turned the entire genre inside-out. Six years later, Goddard has returned with another project that applies the same approach to a different kind of story – the Nixon-era conspiracy thriller – with borderline disastrous effect.
Bad Times at the El Royale tries to condense America’s anxious transition from the breezy Sixties to the paranoid Seventies into one night of ensemble skulduggery, in much the same way Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight boiled down America’s lingering Civil War acrimony into an Agatha Christiestyle drawing-room whodunit.
Topics covered include Vietnam, civil rights, the Charles Manson murders and political assassinations, all spritzed with a musky top note of Gay Talese’s notorious 2016 New Yorker essay The Voyeur’s Motel, about a married father-of-two who customised his 21-room guesthouse with a network of peepholes and tunnels. But the film’s promising conceit gets it nowhere of interest. The result is fiddly, superficial and crazily overlong, and trivialises every subject it brushes up against.
A neat prologue introduces the title location: a faded hotel that straddles the California-nevada border. Inside, the state line bisects the foyer, and rooms are available on either side, for different rates and operating under different bylaws. (The setting is inspired by the Cal Neva Lodge & Casino, itself the site of many shady goings-on during that period.)
In a lengthy, static shot that frames one of the hotel’s seedy rooms like a terrarium, a mysterious figure (Nick Offerman) arrives, rolls up the carpet, then stashes a bundle beneath the floorboards out of view. That sequence takes place in 1959 – and 10 years later, the arrival of an odd quartet of guests one afternoon shores up the sense that every surface masks a secret.
Less hateful eight than furtive four, they’re obviously not what they seem: Jon Hamm’s garrulous vacuum cleaner salesman and Jeff Bridges’s avuncular priest spell out their personalities with pantomime laboriousness, yet Cynthia Erivo’s backing singer and Dakota Johnson’s hippie chick are keener to keep the particulars of their visits to themselves. (Johnson’s character signs the guestbook with two terse words, the second of which is “You”.)
Even so, all are welcomed by the young manager (Lewis Pullman), the only visible member of staff, who explains how the loss of the El Royale’s gambling licence brought on a speedy decline, leaving the vibe distinctly purgatorial these days. (Goddard was a writer on the TV series Lost, whose desert island setting had a similar feel).
A fifth and sixth guest turn up later: another young woman whose background is initially mysterious (Cailee Spaeny), and a swaggering, Manson-like cult leader, glibly played by a miscast Chris Hemsworth.
Still, the four initial guests are convincing – particularly newcomer Erivo, a 31-year-old British stage musical veteran making her impressive film debut here. Her character, Darlene Sweet, is en route to Reno to attempt a solo career.
But even Darlene’s story lacks the depth that would have justified the film’s extremely finicky plot approach, in which a series of dumb and largely predictable reveals as the foursome’s true aims come to light are presented as staggering Lynchian coups de WTF.
The great American meltdown of the Seventies has been captured by some outstanding and unabashedly pulpy films over the years, but Bad Times at the El Royale reduces history to a parlour game – and frankly, this is neither the time nor the place. RC