by Jason Adams
What scares us -- the communal us -- shifts through time. The 70s gave us Vietnam allegories like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, while in the 80s Slasher Movies were all the rage as divorce numbers went up and women asserted their rights. Then there was so-called Torture Porn, which was all the rage while Bush & Cheney were throwing their waterboarding parties. So what now? It's hard not to see Grief as the theme of our current moment -- the great horror films of our age, films like The Babadook and Hereditary, are profound ruminations on a world that's already slipped through our fingers -- a madness so close its breath is hot on your throat, and a knowledge that its our own failures, our own shortcomings, that brought this all down upon us.
Hotel Mumbai is technically not a horror movie (look to Jordan Peele's Us, which Chris just reviewed, for this weekend's official entry in that genre) but it sure operates like one...
We're introduced to a band of characters, some more broadly than others, and wait for the terrorists, the masked murders, to close in, hunting them down. Whether that's strictly moral -- turning real-life tragedy into a violent video-game -- has interested a lot of the reviewers reviewing this movie but it doesn't really interest me; Hotel Mumbai is hardly alone in that regard in our moment in time -- hello, Paul Greengrass.
What interests me more is how our moment in time is demanding these films, this particular catharsis.
The news this morning showed me photographs of women across New Zealand donning head-scarves to show respect to and solidarity with the Muslims who just suffered an act of devastation in their country -- a gorgeous act of humanity, of bringing people together to mourn and to present a united front. These movies, for all their comparative crudeness, are really giving us some of that same thing. A superficial stab at understanding, on an animal level, what the horror of today is, and a vision of its other side.
Hotel Mumbai, the first feature from director Anthony Maras, is relentless and grueling, but also particularly effective -- Maras has a real skill with the most vital aspect of this kind of enclosed space thriller (even if the "enclosed space" here is palatially ginormous) which is giving us a clear lay-out of where we are at every moment; he situates us somewhat masterfully among the many rooms and floors where this horror show plays out, making the terror of moving through it all the more compelling.
Also aiding us on that count is his cast, led by a deeply moving Dev Patel -- I've seen some complaints that the film foregrounds the white guests (that would be Armie Hammer and Jason Isaacs) over brown faces but the rigid Upstairs Downstairs dynamic, surviving alongside India's caste system, leads to some of the film's most fascinating (and I think purposefully troubling) dynamics. Who's put in the way of these guns and bombs wielded by brainwashed kids -- who lives and dies, who is asked to sacrifice, in this world? The film asks all these questions, and brushes up against a lot of uncomfortable truths as it does.