Hostel

Eli Roth’s Hostel begins in a similar vein to Danny Boyle’s The Beach (2000), with thrill-hungry travellers lured off the beaten track by promises of a backpackers’ utopia. In this case the travellers’ paradise is a remote Slovakian hostel where concupiscent eastern European women throw themselves at eager American visitors. But the hostel is a lure for a scam of fearsome depravity: once sucked in, guests are tortured to death for the pleasure of paying sadists.

Venturing further afield after the backwoods camping-trip horror of Cabin Fever (2003), writer-director Roth locates even greater terrors in that mysterious part of the world known as ‘not America’. Indulging the greedy libidos and unbridled hedonism of its inter-railing Californians Josh and Paxton, before punishing them with sustained torment, Hostel is a cautionary tale riddled with a deep paranoia about foreignness. Suspicious of strangers on trains, massed local children and conversations in unintelligible tongues, the film is a virtual wagging finger against journeying overseas.

With an outsider’s eye for eerie otherness, Roth shoots the Slovakian streets as if they are the Venice alleyways of Don’t Look Now; figures appear without warning and disappear without explanation. He avoids the readymade creepiness evoked by filming in pockets of shadowy darkness in favour of scenes that take place in appealingly pellucid daylight. Below ground, prolonged scenes of recreational torture in rank, blood-swilled chambers are charged with an extra frisson of claustrophobic dread by their contrast with such crisp, tourist-brochure sunniness.

Hostel switches from randy teen comedy to cold-sweat nightmare with disconcerting punch. One senses the giddy approval of Quentin Tarantino, whose executive-producer credit gives only a hint of the extent of his mentorship. Roth cheerfully acknowledges his debt: we see a glimpse of Pulp Fiction’s Ezekiel 25:17 scene dubbed into Slovak on a hostel TV; and torture sequences from at least two Tarantino films are invoked during the second half. Modern Japanese horror is the other clear inspiration, and pulp-cinema visionary Takashi Miike appears for a chilling cameo. Hostel and Miike’s Audition share the same glee in the sadistic, acupunctural precision of pain application.

Depicted in unblinking detail, Hostel’s later stages are only for the strongest of stomachs; sporadic gallows humour and film-making verve temper what would otherwise have been indigestible. Hostel confirms Roth as one of the brighter hopes for mainstream horror. As yet he seems willingly confined by the genre’s exploitative parameters. With greater rigour, he might have pushed the disquieting implications of his film’s premise (which is like something out of a J.G. Ballard short story) and made the connection between the paid-for torture in his narrative and the vicarious pleasures of his film’s viewers. Instead, the troubling climax lets us wallow in violent retribution.

This review features in the May 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.