Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)

September 27, 2018 (Fantastic Fest, Austin, Texas), October 12, 2018 (United States) release dates

Directed by Drew Goddard

Screenplay by Drew Goddard

Music by Michael Giacchino

Edited by Lisa Lassek

Cinematography by Seamus McGarvey

Jeff Bridges as Donald “Dock” O’Kelly/Father Daniel Flynn

Cynthia Erivo as Darlene Sweet

Dakota Johnson as Emily Summerspring

Hannah Zirke as young Emily

Jon Hamm as Dwight Broadbeck/Laramie Seymour Sullivan

Cailee Spaeny as Rose Summerspring, Emily’s sister

Charlotte Mosby as young Rose

Lewis Pullman as Miles Miller

Austin Abell as young Miles

Chris Hemsworth as Billy Lee

Nick Offerman as Felix O’Kelly, Dock’s brother

Xavier Dolan as Buddy Sunday, a music producer who fires Darlene

Shea Whigham as Dr. Woodbury Laurence, the prison doctor

Mark O’Brien as Larsen Rogers, Dock’s and Felix’s accomplice

Charles Halford as Sammy Wilds, Dock’s prison cellmate

Jim O’Heir as Milton Wyrick, the presenter at Darlene’s show in Reno

Manny Jacinto as Waring “Wade” Espiritu, a member of Billy Lee’s cult

Alvina August as Vesta Shears, the singer who replaces Darlene

Gerry Nairn as Paul Kraemer, a reporter

William B. Davis as Judge Gordon Hoffman, who sentences Dock

Distributed by 20th Century Fox

Produced by Goddard Textiles, TSG Entertainment

I had heard that Bad Times at the El Royale is an homage to film noir, and I looked forward to seeing it. It didn’t disappoint: The story is completely absorbing, and I often didn’t know what to expect next. It has many of the hallmarks of noir: flashbacks, angst, despair, revenge, greed, murder, robbery. This is one film that seems easy to categorize.

(This blog post about Bad Times at the El Royale contains spoilers.)

The film opens with a black screen and audio only: the sound of a car running and then stopping, and then a car door opening. Then the visual starts with a man entering a hotel room. He puts his suitcases on the bed. He takes out a gun and draws the curtains when he hears footsteps, but it’s nothing. This character is in the shot above, a shot that evokes the cover of a 1930s or 1940s pulp novel, or an Edward Hopper painting. Later in the film, viewers learn that he is Felix O’Kelly, Dock O’Kelly’s brother.

Felix O’Kelly starts dismantling the room: He takes up the floorboards, hides one of his overnight bags under the floor, then puts the room back together. Someone knocks on the door, which he opens. He invites the man at the door in and turns toward the center of the room. The guest shoots Felix O’Kelly in the back with a shotgun.

The film cuts to the title card, then cuts to show the following words: “Ten years later.” And now it’s the 1970s; Nixon is president. Singer Darlene Sweet and Father Daniel Flynn arrive at about the same time at the El Royale Hotel. Laramie Seymour Sullivan is already in the hotel lobby waiting for the front desk clerk and states that he gets the honeymoon suite.

Viewers learn details about the characters, their current circumstances, and their back stories slowly and deliberately. The film doesn’t rush anything, but the tension builds and subsides and then builds and subsides once again. And there is rarely a dull moment. The set is the El Royale itself, which is a shabby establishment that is past its glory days and has a seedy back story itself. And yet the set is lush and beautiful and evocative of the 1970s. The cinematography also evokes the period, the past in general, with its dim lighting and yellowish tinges. Viewers never doubt the time period.

Sullivan, Father Flynn, and Darlene check in and take up residence in their respective rooms. Sullivan looks for listening devices in his and finds several. He leaves his room to do some additional investigating. He returns to the lobby and finds it unattended. He takes the master key from the front desk and explores the area behind the desk. He discovers that the front desk clerk, Miles Miller, is a heroin junkie and is in the middle of knockout high. And he finds a secret passageway that goes past all the rooms. The mirrors in each room are two-way, providing views from the secret passageway. There are also one-way intercoms. He sees Father Flynn taking up the floorboards in his room; sees and hears Darlene practicing her singing; and sees Emily Summerspring, the last guest to arrive, dragging a female body, that of her sister Rose, into her room. Rose’s wrists are bound, and Emily ties her into a chair.

Sullivan is an FBI agent working undercover as an appliance salesman. He calls J. Edgar Hoover from a pay phone outside the hotel to tell him that they have a problem because he found several bugs in his room, not all of them the FBI’s. He also mentions the woman, Emily Summerspring, taking an unconscious hostage into her room. Hoover tells Sullivan not to interfere because the hostage is not part of his mission.

The fact that Sullivan is an FBI agent is the first of many surprises in Bad Times at the El Royale. Many of the main characters have secrets, some decidedly unpleasant. Even the El Royale has a dark past linked to illicit surveillance by the FBI. Sullivan is at the hotel to collect the FBI’s paraphernalia, including microphones and listening devices in his own room. From this point on, the narrative goes in several unexpected directions.

Intertitles (“Room 4,” “Room 5,” “the maintenance closet,” “Reno,” and so on) place viewers in the story. These intertitles also clue viewers that the following sequence focuses on a particular character. Sometimes the sequences include flashbacks that reveal a character’s back story. The narrative from one sequence to the next sometimes overlaps so that viewers see the same part of the story but from another character’s perspective. This structure reveals a lot about the characters and it allows viewers to get a more complete version of particular events.

Bad Times at the El Royale is completely absorbing, but the plot wasn’t quite neat and tidy throughout. Some questions did pop up for me as I was watching the film:

◊ FBI agent Sullivan is killed by Emily Summerspring in her room, and I wondered why someone didn’t arrive looking for him. I know he was working undercover, but he does call Director Hoover from a phone booth outside the hotel. If Sullivan’s case was so important as to warrant direct contact with the head of the FBI, surely someone at the FBI would be interested in his findings and his general well-being. Where were Sullivan’s fellow agents?

◊ I also wondered how Darlene Sweet and Father Flynn, who viewers now know is Dock O’Kelly, made it to Reno with the money that Flynn and his brother Felix stole ten years earlier. Was the FBI interested only in covering up its covert surveillance of the famous people who once frequented the El Royale during its heyday?

◊ Why weren’t the bank robbery and its perpetrators never linked to the El Royale by law enforcement? After all, one of the O’Kelly brothers’ crew found Felix easily enough ten years earlier and murdered him in his hotel room.

◊ Dock O’Kelly undergoes a transformation of sorts as a result of his experiences at the El Royale, but I did wonder if all the violence was necessary for his transformation to occur. Darlene Sweet and Dock O’Kelly help each other get away after everyone else is killed at the El Royale; in fact, Darlene arrives in Reno in time for her next singing gig. My own interpretation is that each character accepts the violence on her or his own terms: Each one makes the decision to be redeemed or not, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that each one escapes being killed.

In spite of my lingering questions, the film doesn’t disappoint. I was absorbed completely by the story and the twists and turns. My questions may mean that I have to see Bad Times at El Royale again, and I don’t think that’s such a bad idea.