Bad Times at the El Royale by Drew Goddard (review)

Check in at the most bizarre hotel this side of Barton Fink, where a group of travelers gather for a night of confrontations, revelations, and gruesome violence. And speaking of the Coen Brothers, Bad Times is right out of their playbook. It’s a dangerous neo-noir set in the late 1960s. It’s a dark and stormy night. Lightning flashes fitfully illuminate the scene. The blood-stained guest register introduces a motley cast of characters. And despite the grim pleasures of it all, there’s a moment of grace that tops it all off at the end.

There’s the priest who’s not a priest, but a thief and ex-con looking for buried money under the floorboards of one of the hotel’s rooms; a vacuum salesman who’s an FBI agent keeping the hotel under surveillance; a struggling lounge singer who just wants to get to a gig in Reno; two young ladies on the run from a phony evangelist, and a self-styled hick evangelist who lives by his own infernal playbook. And yes, the hotel proprietor with lots of secrets of his own: He’s left a string of bodies in his wake; moreover, he possesses an incriminating piece of surveillance film. Did I say “surveillance”? The El Royale Hotel is a voyeur’s paradise. A secret corridor of one-way mirrors affords uninvited glimpses into the unholy activities of the occupants within.

The narrative line is a tangle. We view brief vignettes of each of these lives, only to be rudely wrenched out of the scene by savage and abrupt shock cuts. Events are then rewound and repeated by reverse angles viewed through the one-way mirrors. It’s disorienting, but fascinating. Indeed, a certain diabolical pleasure holds us in a kind of thrall as we piece together the shards and fragments of the story.

Of course, it all ends up in a holocaust of flames, bullets, and bodies. Everything gets sorted out. . . sort of. But amid the penultimate moments, when the priest who’s not a priest hears a last-gasp confession and delivers his own absolution, we are moved by an experience that is nothing less than an epiphany.

So many things could gone wrong here; the kaleidoscopic assortment of characters and fractured incidents could have fallen apart at any moment. However, the conviction and power of all these players keep things under control. In particular, Jeff Bridges and Cynthia Erivo deliver beautifully crafted performances. Bridges’ faux confession scene is among his very finest moments on screen. Erivo’s quietly desperate lounge singer is a miracle of subtlety. The British actress and singer was recently distinguished for her Tony Award-winning performance on Broadway of “Celie” in The Color Purple, and her nuanced a capella singing provides the soul of the story.