B.he smelly and feverish, feverish and putrid and everything gets hot and sticky, this unique avant-garde work is the result of a collaboration between the author and director Stefan Lernous and his colleagues at Slaughterhouse closed, a theater company based in the Belgian-Flemish-speaking city of Mechelen. It has a kind of plot: There’s a guy named Dave (Tom Vermeir, encrusted like everyone else in the film with white make-up that makes him look like a zombie) who takes care of his family’s supposedly empty hotel, an elaborate one Set full of rooms encrusted with mold, grotto and dead stuff, all about to mulch into a muddy, semi-organic mass. Perhaps the title is an indication that all of this takes place in a para-aquatic terrain, which would explain the abundance of tridents, aquariums, and other water.
However, Dave is not all alone; This slushy hell has other people in it. There is an invisible neighbor who watches extremely loud porn that Dave communicates with over shouts. A young woman named Nora (Anneke Sluiters) who insists on renting a room; another hoarse-voiced woman (Ruth Becquart) in a meaty pantyhouse complaining that she has been bored of beating her fingers all day. Dave’s angrily screaming mother (Tania Van der Sanden) is there, and Dave’s dead aunt Lucy (Dirk Lavryssen), who appears to have died on a sofa some time ago, only notices her changed condition when Nora takes a closer look. Later there are wild parties, autopsies in the kitchen and all his life Dave lived in a showcase with a pretty strawberry blonde and the ginger kids of a soccer team.
Perhaps the Hotel Poseidon is intended as a nightmare or a diorama of Dave’s subconscious. But it really does give very little of actual significance, and it was not entirely pleasant to see. But this film has an odd, irrefutable integrity that requires and deserves admiration, especially for the intricate design by art director Sven Van Kuijk and the insane acoustic bricolage of screeching violins, echoes, dialogue and the sound of someone moving furniture, who acts as a regular setback through it.
Hotel Poseidon will be published on Arrow on January 3rd.
