Room 304 – Værelse 304 (2011)

Directed by: Birgitte Stærmose | 88 minutes | drama | Actors: Mikael Birkkjær, Stine Stengade, David Dencik, Luan Jaha, Ariadna Gil, Lourdes Faberes, Ksenija Marinkovic, Trine Dyrholm, Magnus Krepper, Ivo Gregurevic, Leon Lucev, Mona C. Soliman, Ana Risueño, Kristian Jørn, Kristian Jørn Orhan Guner, Leonarda Klasan, Noa Nikolic

A hotel is simultaneously extremely intimate and remarkably anonymous. You are (far) away from home, but still create a kind of home in a hotel room, where you sleep in the same bed where a stranger has not long lain before you. What happens behind all those closed doors? If those walls could talk… It was with this in mind that Danish filmmaker Birgitte Staermose worked on her feature debut ‘Room 304’ (2011). Although the blood and gunshot in the very first scene suggest that we are dealing with a thriller, ‘Room 304’ is above all a drama, in which the often unsettled lives of both hotel guests and employees are brought together in a different way. somewhat artificially strung together. As many as eight languages ​​are spoken in this film; in addition to Danish, we hear English, German, Spanish, Albanian, Croatian and Filipino, among others. This multilinguality does not make ‘Room 304’ any less complex.

Set in a hotel in Copenhagen, the film follows the people who check in and out and others who work there over three days. Everyone seems to have something up their sleeve. There is Kasper (Mikael Birkkjaer), the owner of the hotel, who is soul under his arm after a personal tragedy. To relieve his grief, he cheats on his wife Helene (Trine Dyrholm) with reception manager Nina (Stine Stengade), whose love for another co-worker, Jonas (Magnus Krepper), has waned. A lonely Spanish flight attendant (Ariadna Gil) has settled in the hotel to get her mind off things, but it turns out it’s not so easy to find someone in the bar for a nice one night stand. Kosovar dishwasher Agim (Luam Jaha) has something else on his mind: he is determined to avenge the pain inflicted on his wife (Ksenija Marinkovic). The stiff receptionist Martin (David Dencik) is not interested in that, he doesn’t seem to be really interested in anything. When the Filipino chambermaid (Lourdes Faberes) finds a gun between the sheets, the lives of all these people are turned upside down.

It remains a mystery for a long time how the fork is in the stem in ‘Room 304’. Who belongs to whom, what is the order in which things happen and above all: why does a character do what he does? Staermose and fellow screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson deliberately (for a long time) omit information and make many jumps in time. Together with the maze of characters who all speak in their own language, it makes the film very complex and not very accessible, especially in the beginning. As more puzzle pieces fall into place and the interrelationships and individual motivations become clear, ‘Room 304’ gains momentum. The second half is therefore much stronger than the confusing first half. Perhaps that is also because she has pushed some less well-developed storylines (for example, around the Kosovar couple, whose storyline serves purely as a catalyst) to the background. Staermose has gathered an international troupe of actors, with well-known (Stengade, Dencik) and lesser-known faces doing just fine. We previously saw Luan Jaha in her short film about Kosovo ‘Out of Love’, which earned her an honorable mention at the Berlin Film Festival. Her shorts ‘Small Avalanches’ and ‘Sophie’ have won prizes before. This Danish has quite a bit to offer. That’s why it’s a shame that she made ‘Room 304’ unnecessarily complex and that she couldn’t develop every storyline equally well. The characters don’t get really sympathetic during the film either. So the story doesn’t quite work out. Then it is a stroke of luck that ‘Room 304’ was filmed in a stylish and finely claustrophobic manner. Although that pleasant style doesn’t quite save the day…