Writer-Director Terence Gross's comedy is a lunatic extrapolation from the "hotel as hell" sitcom represented by Fawlty Towers, but pushed further into Gothic absurdity. The Gormenghast pile on an isle in the leaden North Channel is home to three siblings running it as their late mum decreed: dictatorially and dismally, serving food that creates constipation and (eventually) produces excrement convertible into combustible fuel. "We scoop in profit at both ends," crows Daniel Craig, the eczemacheeked manager and maître d'.
Katrin Cartlidge, as his spooky sister, administers colonic irrigation to the geriatric boarders like a torturer's apprentice. And Stephen Tompkinson, as the rebel brother, presides manically over the kitchen and wrestles with a boiler like a Cyclopean monster. Toni Collette is the ex-sous-chef who returns to warm up an old romance with her boss: she packs so many new calories into the menu that lavatories are over-worked and guests paddle in their own waste.
A mausoleum gloom discourages daylight from entering, sparks shower like meteorites from explosive circuits, steam rises from every nook and cranny, boiling water makes the pipes dance, and what the guests get up to in private is best kept that way.
This film is a folie de grandeur et de misère: quite a Continental trick for an English movie to achieve, I admit. But where its audience is probably requires a demographic study of European minorities. It may catch on with fans of the Steve Roberts/Vivien Henshall parody of all things English and ghastly, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, made in 1980; or, more recently, the French absurdist comedy Delicatessen.
Alison Dominitz's production design achieves a Titanic impressiveness in impending disaster; Gyula Pados's photography has a crepuscular creepiness. Trouble is, it doesn't know when to stop piling on the horrors, literally plumbs the depths, then goes deeper still. By which time, one is clamouring for the emergency exit.
Hotel Splendide
Cert: cert12
