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Hotel Royal
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Among the spookiest sights of the global pandemic: the vast luxury hotels, hastily shuttered – but with, at times, one pale, enigmatic light on somewhere inside. The 29-minute Hotel Royal (like, in a different vein, Ulrich Seidl’s Rimini [2022]) takes off from this spectacle, recording the episodic path of a chambermaid through one mysterious room after another. These spaces are always filmed from the same angles. They remain unpopulated, but reveal tell-tale signs: crumpled sheets, a book, a rifle … Salomé Lamas’ parafictions (as she calls them) freely veer from documentary to fantasy, pithy observation to philosophical reflection. Fittingly, her entire Hotel Royal project exists also in installation and photo-based forms created in 2020 and 2021. A superbly controlled soundtrack and the rigorous procession of images evoke, at moments, a version of The Shining (1980) for our all-too-real, materially haunted present. © Adrian Martin October 2021 (+ update February 2025) |
