Synopsis
A portrait about a low-key family, being haunted by collective Oedipus complex from their deceased mother. is a shivering tale of adventure about the Blanche family who try to maintain their hotel on a deserted island. Just like in Hitchcock? film , there is a photograph of the dead mother hanging on the wall in a boiler room, and leaking from the gas pipe is an apparition of the deceased mother. The eldest son who tries to maintain the hotel, the daughter who spent her youth at a massage parlor, and the curious lastborn-are all victims who never had a chance to leave the island even once. The hotel soon becomes a society of its own, the family with its sadomasochistic secrets, demanding the lodgers to refrain excessive life styles-for their own sake. The situation changes when Kath, who once learned to cook at the hotel, comes back. When Kath and her ex-lover Ronald set out on a cuisine competition, this in turn generates a vital force of life to the Blanche family and the lodgers. Director Terence Gross criticizes the social oppression and hypocrisy by means of fairy tales and allegorical sense of humor. In the hotel tub where health is the utmost priority, rusty water comes out. When the food served does not taste good, the lodgers complain by throwing their false teeth. It is similar with films like and in that this film also depicts the relation between social oppression and basic instincts. However, more picturesque than 's Overlook Hotel and more brilliant than 's Misty Hotel, the film shows new possibilities for British film, much in the vein of today's Hollywood films. (SIM Young-seop)