BFI London Film Festival: In the Room

BFI London Film Festival: 238 films. From 71 countries. 16 cinemas. 12 days. One Festival.

A series of international guests conduct their tangled affairs on the sheets of a hotel bed in this paean to the pains and pleasures of love. These many stories, though separated by years, all take place in the same Singapore hotel room. They include a repressed gay romance, a sparky young Korean ‘will they/won’t they’, and a couple’s tender last night together before a gender-reassignment surgery.

Each decade is given a fabulous production design that illustrates the mores of the era while hinting at the hotel’s gradual decline. Threaded together by a ghost story about a rock star who burnt out too soon, and the tale of a woman forever trying to replicate the lost lust of a former lover, the film is infused with a nostalgic, dreamy sense of the passing of time. So many small intimacies set to fade without a trace.

(Notes by Kate Taylor)

In the Room, dir. Eric Khoo, Hong Kong-Singapore 2015, 90 mins.