Films 2000s
(2005) Hostel
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006
Hostel
Director: Eli Roth
Release: 2005
In the construction of "Hostel," director Eli Roth seems torn between a morality tale and an exploitation film. The first half of of the movie erects triple monoliths to irresponsibility and arrogance, the second half attempts to set a universe of punishment into motion against these traits. Neither works very well.
Paxton, Josh and Oli (Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson and Eythor Gudjonsson) are backpackers in Europe. Paxton and Josh are American, Oli is Icelandic. Together they are earnestly awful. Between drugs, prostitutes and general low-burn disdain for their "hosts," the trio spend enough time molesting Amsterdam to discover the name of a supposed hedonistic heaven in Slovakia where they can reportedly attain their apparent collective hearts' desires, several women at once.
Or something along those lines. Motivation takes a back seat to behavior and they hustle to Slovakia where the hostel of the film's title awaits. En route they encounter The Dutch Businessman (Jan Vlasak) who casts the young men's suppressed homoerotic buddyhood in a predatory context. Escape his hand-on-knee advance, they descend on Slovakia - and Slovakia descends upon them.
One by one they vanish in the night, with flimsy cell phone messages or nothing at all to explain their absence. It is Paxton who ends up alone at the hostel, prying at the trashy seductive pair (Barbara Nedeljakiva as Natalya and Jana Kaderabvoa as Svetlana) who seem to hold the key to Josh and Oli's disappearance. His search leads him to a sprawling industrial wasteland, where his friends and other have become the props in a pay-for-torture Disneyland and he is subjected to a prolonged gauntlet of gore and disfigurement.
Roth's vision of a buddy movie is replete with exposed ass cheeks and rampant misogyny. The panorama of Amsterdam's sex and pot is explored through a broadly painted and fantastical canvas of tavern keepers, lithe and effeminate pimps (Alex, played by Lubomir Bukovy), stoned-out kids and futuristic whore houses. The point of the sequence, in Roth's script, is to build up Oli, Josh and Paxton as unlikeable but all-too-familiar incarnations of Western commercialism. In a kind of triple mind, the young men represent facets of a single personality - Oli is the unchecked Id, Josh the aloof and analytical Ego and Paxton a kind of Dr. McCoy to their Kirk and Spock.
The fault in the story is that nothing interesting happens. No single sequence, nor the aggregate of the episodes, create the impression of much more than loud and obnoxious twenty-somethings. The set up for "Hostel's" second half fails to sufficiently vilify or engender the like-ability of its characters.
The second half of the film meanders for too long in its seduction phase - and the absence of real screen time with the initially captured backpackers has the effect of distance rather than the dread and alienation Roth presumably sought.
Josh and Paxton's torture is the key to the balance in "Hostel." Roth's approach however, skimps on impact and instead pushes a chase sequence that feels just as slightly mismatched to "Hostel's" first to components as they do to each other.
What does happen in the last half of "Hostel" is fairly brutal, but chiefly implied. Roth peers into the torture chambers at the Slovakian factory, but his lens is quick to move away from the biological horror perpetrated there. While it would perhaps verge on the sadistic to demand more graphic scenes of pain and dismemberment from "Hostel," (there are quite a few and they are very graphic, in a makeup effects way) the question is born out of the aesthetic of the unflinching examination that Roth employed in the Amsterdam and early Slovakian scenes.
Without a similarly patient camera in the warehouse rooms, the effect of Josh and Paxton's experiences is robbed of the discomfort-causing lingering that make the brothels and apartments of what has come before somewhat effective.
Furthermore, if "Hostel" is meant to speak to crime and punishment, or the perils of curiosity, or even to the self-destructive spiral of rampant capitalism, the warehouse sequences generate a message that seems antithetical to the morality tale.
Rather than pitch its characters into a Dante's inferno, exhibiting the universal wheel that must stretch and cleanse them of their consumerist infection, "Hostel" posits that the moderate mind (Paxton's) can escape whatever mess it has created.
So, Paxton plays at Ulysses in Cyclops' cave, in this case leading his one-eyed Japanese damsel in distress past the monsters. His previous friends are literally reduced to objects with which he briefly interacts.
The emotional and psychological promise of Roth's visit to Hell is abandoned for car chases, a cliché and then confusing train platform escape - then the inevitable revenge fantasy by Paxton on the Dutch Businessman.
Where Roth succeeds is in his cinematic efforts. His sets, his lights, his shots and the progression of color and texture across "Hostel" tell a story entirely apart from his teetering script. Lurid greens and red are slowly bled from the film until "Hostel" is transformed into a colorscape of rust and gray.
His wet, dark world of the Slovakian kill-house is claustrophobic and convincing. Would that he had spent more time there and more thoroughly soaked the screen in the sloppy and awful fetish-world he created. Roth's most interesting characters, in "Hostel," are his torturers. The Dutch Businessman, The American Client (an over the top Rick Hoffman), The German Surgeon (a positively neurotic and terrifying Petr Janis) and even Miike Takashi (Japanese director Takashe Miike in a cameo) are conflicted, human and palpably real. They are reduced, by the need for speed in Roth's writing, to plot machines who advance the action toward Paxton's escape.
If "Hostel" had slowed down, eliminated its exploitative tits-and-ass sequences and spent more time in its rightful home, Hell, it could have been an atmospheric masterpiece in Roth's relatively early career. Instead, "Hostel" comes off as adolescent for the most part and diffuse where it could be focused and powerful.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Hostel, 2005
Rather than pitch its characters into a Dante's inferno, exhibiting the universal wheel that must stretch and cleanse them of their consumerist infection, "Hostel" posits that the moderate mind (Paxton's) can escape whatever mess it has created.
