Directed by Julio Maria Martino, Country of Hotels plays out
mostly within the confines of a hotel's room 508, where various troubled
souls check in and find themselves at the centre of a surreal
mystery.
Written by David Hauptschein, the film stars Siobhán Hewlett, Matthew Leitch, Adam Leese, Michael Laurence and
Charles Pike.
"When we were making Country of Hotels, we worked hard to create an environment which was relentlessly
oppressive and claustrophobic, occasionally punctuated by moments of dark
humor," says Martino. "An enclosed world in which an unseen, unnamed and mutable threat lurked
behind hotel room doors and down long lonely corridors. A threat which
might manifest itself suddenly and at any moment. In visualizing this
world, I felt we were trying to create something highly idiosyncratic and
very different from the outward appearance of most people's daily lives.
Indeed, Country of Hotels was meant to be about an alternate
reality - what happens if you step into a decaying, dilapidated hotel,
lose your mind, and never leave. However, increasingly over the past few
years, people's daily existences in many parts of the world have come to
resemble this experience. As in Country of Hotels, computer and television screens, together with the sounds of our own
voices, have become our closest and most reliable companions; and the
person knocking on our door brings with them a potentially deadly
message."
Country of Hotels is on worldwide VOD from May 26th.
Check out the trailer and poster below.
The official synopsis reads:
Country of Hotels tells the stories of the desperate souls who pass through the doors of 508, a room on the fifth floor of an anonymous, decaying hotel. We are taken on a surreal and blackly comic journey down its lonely corridors and behind its outdated furnishings and stained surfaces. The story plunges us into the ever-turning carousel of haunted lives who check in and out of this sinister establishment.
