Directed by Abel Ferrara. Written by Christ Zois and Abel Ferrara.
Big business hates humanity. Look around, you’ll see the outsized influence it exercises on the rights of people, the ever-growing consolidation of wealth it creates, and how it has sacrificed our ecosystems and livable habitats on the altar of “value creation” for its stakeholders.
Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel doesn’t make those statements, it only seems like a foregone conclusion. Instead, it’s a futuristic look at a world where conglomerates act like warring empires, their cold war unrestricted by borders. They’re their own sovereign nations, and employees changing employers are carried out like defections. In this new economy, corporate headhunters like Fox (Chrisopther Walken) and X (Willem Dafoe) act like gangsters, hanging out in dimly-lit bars, speaking a language of their own, and lending a shadowy hand to household brands when dark deeds need doing.
In this case, it’s enabling the headhunting of a highly-prized scientist, but it goes far beyond a LinkedIn invite and a paid-for lunch at a faceless downtown restaurant. It’s more like a military psyops, where the target must renounce their employ, leave their family, and start anew elsewhere, blind to the machinations that got them there.
So what’s Fox’s plan? A honeypot operation, enlisting the alluring Sandii (Asia Argento) to seduce the scientist and entice him to leave his former life behind. But her wiles have their effect on X, too. You know what they say about mixing business and pleasure…
New Rose Hotel is a sci-fi fantasy with little resonance in the physical. Based on a short story by William Gibson, the near-future it plays out in isn’t different from our own, and the technology on display was dated before the movie even premiered. Spiritually, however, it rings true, with the malaise, the alienation, and dehumanization feeling prescient. It’s extreme, but anyone who’s watched people debase themselves in meetings with meaningless buzzwords, or worse yet, share their inspirational palaver on LinkedIn, can recognize the voided humanity on display here.
This is New Rose Hotel’s center of gravity. It’s magnetic, and Ferrara ups the unease with much of the movie filtered through omnipresent CCTV, magically always watching people at impossible moments from every angle. Having these pale images of happenings across the world fed to us creates a dehumanizing distance.
Ferrara wants some humanity as well, though. In watching X and Sandii, he switches gears and summons lovelorn melancholy as well as a hedonistic indulgence. It’s a bit of MTV-ified moviemaking, this reliance on pop music and longing movements in moments of intimacy. But these moments are respites, before it once again gives away to cynical visual static.
The plot and narrative of New Rose Hotel is flimsy however. The downside of the visual direction is that much of the story happens off-camera, and relayed back to us with something akin to a Playstation 1-era loading screen. It means there’s not much to keep you engaged beyond the dystopian vibes and performances made to entertain, not to persuade.
In the midst of it all, you have Christopher Walken camping it up as Fox. The performance is outsized and enigmatic, the kind Walken made his own, portraying Fox as some kind of deranged jester king. Hooked on the game of it all, he unloads nonsense about power struggles, how he sees the angles, the long game. A charismatic car salesman, and a megalomaniac at that. The kind of man this future deserves.
These antics, fun as they are, keep you at bay too. New Rose Hotel does aim for more than caricature, but Walken sucks up all the oxygen in the room. The societal satire is perfect for him, but Ferrara also wants us to feel there’s a genuine story about people here, which is a hard sell with Walken leading proceedings.
As X, Dafoe must act a wide-eyed squire to Walken’s delusional knight, but it’s still refreshing to see him here, younger and sensitive, compared to now, where he’s usually made to play something resembling Fox, or a taciturn grouch. In a world where nothing’s real, Dafoe lends New Rose Hotel the modicum of humanity it has.
William Gibson’s original source material is the power of New Rose Hotel, and Ferrara’s low-fi style is a perfect conduit for its chilly vision. This ridiculous world of industry, bottom lines, money, money, money, and acolytes so enslaved to its society’s dogma is an uncanny creation. To watch is to see ominous clouds form on the horizon that suddenly swoop in to cover you in its darkness, but the awe never quite follows the shock, and New Rose Hotel doesn’t make it past charismatic sequences and campy performances.
Mikkel Frederiksen 