Bad Times at the El Royale is a 2018 American neo-noir thriller film written, directed, and co-produced by Drew Goddard. The film stars Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Jon Hamm, Cailee Spaeny, Lewis Pullman, and Chris Hemsworth. The hyperlink-style film follows six strangers and an employee at the El Royale, a hotel located along the California–Nevada border, whose secrets intersect on a night in the late 1960s. The film explores themes of morality, faith, and redemption, with the state border and other visual elements symbolizing the concept of right and wrong.
Goddard began writing the spec script for the film in November 2016, and compiled a list of songs into his screenplay. After telling major studios to avoid buying the script if they could not buy the licenses for each piece of music, he sold it to 20th Century Fox in March 2017. Principal photography began on January 29, 2018, with cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, and concluded on April 6. The El Royale hotel was built entirely on a studio set in Burnaby, under the supervision of production designer Martin Whist, who had envisioned designing a perfectly symmetrical hotel. During post-production, editing was completed by Lisa Lassek and the musical score was composed by Michael Giacchino. The marketing campaign for the film included posters, trailers, and television advertisements, stylized to evoke nostalgia for the noir genre and to make it stand out against other films in theaters.
Bad Times at the El Royale premiered at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles on September 22, 2018, and was theatrically released in the United States on October 12. The film underperformed at the box office, grossing $31.8 million against its $32 million production budget. It received mixed-to-positive reviews from critics, who praised Giacchino's score, performances of the cast, and McGarvey's cinematography, but criticized its pacing, runtime, character beats, and Goddard's writing. At the 45th Saturn Awards, the film received five nominations, Best Writing for Goddard, Best Actor for Bridges, Best Supporting Actor for Pullman, Best Supporting Actress for Erivo, and won for Best Thriller Film.
Plot
The El Royale, once popular with the wealthy until losing its gambling license, is a hotel that straddles the California–Nevada border. In 1959, Felix O'Kelly hides a money bag under the floorboards of his room. His accomplice arrives and shoots him dead. A decade later, Catholic priest Daniel Flynn, singer Darlene Sweet, salesman Laramie Seymour Sullivan, and hippie Emily Summerspring arrive at the hotel, now run solely by heroin addict Miles Miller, and book separate rooms.
Upon checking into the honeymoon suite, Laramie begins removing wiretaps but unexpectedly finds a second set as well. After stealing the hotel's master key, he discovers a secret corridor where every room can be observed through one-way mirrors and filmed with a camera. Laramie sees Darlene singing, Daniel removing the floorboards of his room, and Emily holding a young woman captive. In the parking lot, Laramie calls into the FBI, revealing himself to be Special Agent Dwight Broadbeck. He is instructed by J. Edgar Hoover to focus on his mission of collecting the surveillance materials the FBI had planted and ignore the kidnapping. Believing the mission has been compromised, Dwight is advised to prevent the guests from leaving. To do so, Dwight disables their cars.
Daniel invites Darlene to join him for dinner in the hotel lounge. There, Darlene says she is practicing for a performance in Reno and Daniel reveals his memory is deteriorating. While he is getting drinks, she sees him spiking her beverage and knocks him unconscious with a bottle. Miles later finds and revives Daniel, telling him that he wants to undertake a confession but Daniel refuses. Miles, looking for the missing master key, leads Daniel to the secret corridor, explaining that he used to regularly film intimate encounters that he had to send to his superiors. Miles also admits to having withheld one incriminating film of a deceased public figure who had been kind to him. When Daniel leaves to evaluate said film, Miles witnesses through the one-way mirror Dwight attempting to rescue Emily's hostage, revealed to be her younger sister, Rose. When Emily kills Dwight with a shotgun, it also shoots out the mirror, exposing the corridor and injuring Miles.
Before these events, Emily had forcibly removed her sister from a dangerous cult, led by Billy Lee. In the present, Rose secretly calls Billy to tell him where she is. A witness to Dwight's murder, Darlene tries to escape by car but fails due to his tampering with her vehicle. Daniel enters her car and reveals to her that he is Donald "Dock" O'Kelly, imprisoned since a botched armored truck robbery in 1959. Recently paroled, he arrived in disguise to retrieve the money hidden by his brother Felix, but due to his failing memory, he picked the wrong room and tried to drug Darlene to gain access to hers. To earn her trust, he offers to split the cash with her. They retrieve the money, but Billy and his cult arrive and take them, Emily, and Miles hostage.
In a flashback, Billy preaches to his cult how people are forced to choose sides by getting Rose to fight another girl for the chance to sleep with him as Emily watches nearby. In the present, a compliant Rose watches Billy as he interrogates the group and finds the film, which he realizes is more valuable than the money. He forces Emily to choose a color in a game of roulette between her and Miles, and kills her when she loses. Before Billy completes another round of roulette, Dock attacks him, a melee ensues, and a fire spreads. When Darlene implores a shell-shocked Miles to help, he reveals that he served in the Vietnam War as a sniper. Miles picks up a gun and kills Billy and his followers, but a distraught Rose stabs him in the stomach before being shot by Dock. Darlene convinces "Father Flynn" to absolve Miles of the guilt over his wartime actions before he dies. They then toss the film into the fire and leave with the money. Sometime later, in Reno, Dock attends Darlene's soul performance at a casino lounge.
Cast
Themes and analysis Deconstruction As Kyle Kizu from The Hollywood Reporter notes, writer and director Drew Goddard's filmography has deconstructed genres several times. Focusing on the 2018 film, he said it was the filmmaker's "most controlled and fruitful piece of deconstruction" as it was able to present its thesis, of "what looks plain and ordinary hides something beneath", with its opening scene through a literal metaphor of a man deconstructing a room. While The A.V. Clubs Katie Rife noted that the film attempted to deconstruct its neo-noir genre, but that it was instead "a structurally ambitious example of same", Matthew Razak of Flixist wrote that the film purposely avoided deconstructing its main genre as it "mashes together a whole wealth of genres and delivers an utterly unique, unpredictable, and unexpected movie that never stays still long enough to be anything but itself". In a negative light, Andrew Paredes from News.ABS-CBN.com said that the film's runtime made it difficult to analyze, and that the film could have been "both a deconstruction and a commentary" or neither, and that only Goddard could say. When asked if he had focused on deconstructing the genres in his film like he previously did with the horror-comedy The Cabin in the Woods in 2011, Goddard said "It's funny because in both cases that was not conscious either way. I just sort of go with what feels right for the story. Cabin was very aggressive in its approach. Whereas, in this case, [...] it just sort of came out inherently. I didn't want to make it about the genre."
Right and wrong A major aspect of the film was its visualization of each character's morality. One of its main cues to this was the presence of the California–Nevada border dividing the hotel. In one of the opening scenes, Darlene Sweet takes her time walking across the state line and crosses it only with the help of Father Daniel Flynn, never actually stepping on the line itself. However, characters such as cult leader Billy Lee calmly walk in between the line without a second thought. To further illustrate this idea, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey used color to give each character a "photographic signature". With this process, he assigned Billy to the color red for the significance of "impending doom, blood, and death", black and white to Daniel to tell his distinctions between the truth and deception, and bright colors to Darlene for her character's hopefulness and purity. Goddard said he placed the story in 1969 due to the circumstances and tensions during the decade while drawing inspiration on morality from the techniques used by the Coen brothers.
Crisis of faith
Alissa Wilkinson from Vox said the film's themes tackled "religion, salvation, and who we really are" and that the film was about "humanity's drive to find redemption". Believing that the state line served as the "existential crossroads" each character was facing, she came to the conclusion that the hotel was a "stand-in for purgatory". She noted that the main point of the use of religion in the film was the idea that confessing would help the characters "[speak] freely about their past misdeeds in time for someone else to see them for who they really are". Tracy Palmer, from Signal Horizon, similarly evaluated the story and arrived at the assumption that Daniel was, in fact, God testing six people in purgatory, and as "Darlene never commits any sin beyond hating herself and aiding a criminal find his money [...] she is rewarded for her charity, and acceptance of self by singing for an audience what she wants, how she wants to look for eternity."
The Hollywood Reporters Ciara Wardlow said the film had "a lot to say about faith". She began her analysis with the mention that the reveal of Daniel not being a priest but bank robber Dock O'Kelly as being similar to "other invocations of religion" turning out to be misleading. She explained the decision of Dwight Broadbeck to violate his orders to potentially rescue a kidnapping victim, as his attempt to do what is right after reciting to his daughter a revised version of the prayer "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep". After concluding that all the characters in the film were having their faith tested, such as Miles Miller seeking forgiveness for his sins and Billy playing God as a cult leader, Wardlow cited Pascal's wager to summarize the major theme of the project: "Bad Times repeatedly asks what is 'goodness' even, or forgiveness? And who is qualified to give it, for that matter?"
Furthermore, a journalist named Jasmine from SSZee Media studied the film and wrote that it was "a study of religion" as every character was having a "crisis of faith". Focusing on the introduction of Billy Lee and how he uses religion to take advantage of his followers and to pose as a God himself, "walking the line between good and evil", Jasmine noted the similarity of his followers to the "disciples following Jesus". Also analyzing a scene in which a shot was framed to make Billy appear to have a halo on his head, she interpreted that his character was created to focus more on threatening appearances through his movements and words, calling it "the performance of Chris Hemsworth's career".
Film reel