The Haunted Hotel Review
By Colton Gomez | 04/07/24 | 1:36 A.M. Mountain Time
Horror, Thriller | Rated TV-MA | 1 hr 50 min | Film Release Date: November 30, 2023
“The Haunted Hotel” is an Indonesian horror flick directed by Guntar Soeharjanto. This film has all the makings of a good horror film but fails to deliver a satisfying punch. This movie really needed to show more than it told, and it told a lot. While a little rough around the edges in terms of dialogue, exposition, some camera work, and script work, what we get is a fun and scary horror film.
The film opens with a prologue that shows a cleaning lady going upstairs to check out some noises and sees a severely albino woman with red eyes wearing a black dress, sitting at a desk in a dark and dusty room (though this character did not see her face, we get plenty of glimpses at it later). This strange character, positioned on the third floor that is permanently closed for renovations with no workers in sight, lies in wait at the end of the hall in an unmarked room. Upon opening the door, the cleaning lady hears, “Three days, midnight.” This woman meets her fate three days later at midnight, dead. I won’t tell here how she died, but the film shows and mentions it plenty of times. This fate awaits anybody who hears a crying woman and goes upstairs to the off-limits floor to check it out.
Sisters Raina (Luna Maya) and Fey (Bianca Hello), move to Semarang to help their grandparents run their hotel. Raina runs into a past boyfriend, Ardo (Christian Sugiono), after taking Fey to school as her guardian. The full significance of the subplot of their relationship will probably not be as impactful on Western audiences. This has to do with established gender roles in Javanese culture and the influence of the Islamic and Hindu religions. Their relationship subplot is dealt with apprehension on Raina’s part and acceptance and love on Ardo’s part.
The three of them seek guidance from a local Shaman in dealing with the hateful presence in the unmarked room. This leads them on a short scavenger hunt that is contextualized by Raina and Fey’s father’s involvement with the girl in the unmarked room. Having passed away, they look through his old things that help them on their journey. Fighting the clock and sometimes each other, they pray for safety and take action against evil.
The film is certainly missing my want for reveal and suspense. It loves to show the scary girl and the horrible fate that each of her victims faces. We don’t get a chance to imagine the face of this voice as she is shown very early on in the film. It would be better to let the audience stew in our agonizing apprehension of what lies in wait at the end of the hallway, but we know all along. We know what happens in three days at midnight, how it’s going to happen, and who’s doing it.
Wouldn’t it be better for us to hear a disconnected voice, see the end result of investigating that voice, and having to guess at all in between? All the while we would be fearing for the characters, not knowing what dangers they may face. But then here, we run into another minor issue.
The characters in this film are not real people. At least, they don’t feel like complete people with lives outside of this film’s events. We are told all about their lives in relation to the events of this plot. We barely get a chance to know them as people before we are working with them, trying to figure out how to stop the killings. We are almost just as attached to them as we are with the cleaning lady at the top of the film. We need to identify with them in some way or sympathize with them deeper than we are able to. Basically, we know they are going to die, but we are about as familiar with them as we are with everyday strangers. We should really get to know them intimately, like they are family members, and we have to watch them suffer through this trial, really giving us cause to root for them.
But it doesn’t even feel like the characters know they are family. Raina’s sister, Fey, will tell Raina all about Raina. This is purely for the benefit of the audience and is just bad exposition told through dialogue. Raina knows about Raina. Fey knows about Raina. There should be no reason for Fey to tell Raina about Raina if they both know who Raina is. Fey is only telling her sister this because she knows somehow that the audience doesn’t know who Raina is, so she’s telling us. It’s very clunky and the majority of dialogue needed to be much less expository and much more subtextual.
Characters will say direct things to each other about events relating to the plot. They will slowly piece together a very simple non-puzzle out loud for everyone to hear. Multiple times, they will repeat dialogue, not even for the audience to understand, but for the other characters to understand. Which makes us, the audience, sit there while the characters catch up. In a translation scene, we hear the same dialogue line twice, which makes the scene move twice as slow.
This could have been a great opportunity to layer on subtext, letting the translator filter or change words to either help or hinder the story. He is merely there as a human tool for the characters to speak to a third party through, who doesn’t speak their language. When someone takes a phone call, we hear both sides of the conversation, and then the person present will turn around to tell the group exactly what we just heard. It’s clear the filmmakers don’t trust the audience to understand, which is a big disappointment.
Anyway, the actors perform fairly well. I believed them most of the time that they were experiencing the things the film wanted me to believe they were experiencing.
The color grading was too intense for a scary film such as this one. The intense teal and orange at times sucked me out of the world of horror and into a film studio. I wasn’t thinking, “Why is she going there?” I was thinking, “Does ‘Transformers’ look this bad?”
There’s lots of fun to be had in this film but it could have been so much more. It could have been really story driven with strong-willed characters that we care about, trying to survive in the wake of their undeserved misfortune. Instead, we are following some people we don’t really know trying not to die, while they slowly weave their way through the plot. The background story of the girl is interesting, and it makes sense. Perhaps too much sense. Here, again, the film is laying it on so thick, that we can’t move. Every question you could have had will be answered. There is no mystery, there is no speculation, there is nothing for the audience to do. The film likes to talk down to us in this way. It can feel preachy at times about putting your faith in god, praying, pre-destination, suicide is a sin, and the like. It’s not fun to be talked at by a film.
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