Accept Our Sincere Apologies

An elegant hotel in Venice, its shadowy elevators and dark-wood salons a remnant of an older world, exacts a peculiar, transformative hold over its guests in Juja Dobrachkous’s mesmeric and surrealistic sophomore feature Accept Our Sincere Apologies, which had its world premiere in the Harbour section of the Rotterdam International Film Festival. It follows the Russia-born, London-based director’s equally oneiric 2021 debut feature Bebia, à mon seul désir, about a model returning to the Georgian provinces for a funeral, which premiered in Rotterdam’s Tiger competition in 2021 before securing a slot in the New Directors/New Films showcase in New York; it also explored death rites and labyrinthine escape routes to freedom. Accept Our Sincere Apologies is again shot in stylish, timeless black-and-white (they both share DOP Veronica Solovyeva). It favours haunting atmosphere and drifting, Lynchian dream logic over socio-political referentiality, with a crypticness by design that will beguile some and exasperate others.

Hotel manager and covert pill-popper Eva (played by male model Oskar Grzelak, in a bold casting decision that deepens a sense of fluid boundaries and ambiguous identities) is our troubled and shaky guide through this maze of transient connections and obsessive encounters. She has not left the place for three years, and the incessant, extravagant demands and random emotional outbursts of the guests, whether it’s over a lost tooth or grief over an industrialised world that machine-manufactures orchids, are wearing her down. Her svelte frame often lingers unnoticed in doorways or halls as the occupants indulge their whims and carry out their dealings, and she is the eyes and ears of a building that prides itself in seeing and anticipating everything. But proximity to secrets and the kind of self-indulgent displays that wealth and status enable does not confer much power upon her. It’s Eva’s words, in voice-over, that we rely on to orient us in this walled-in trap of amoral suspension from the world outside, but as she speaks of her alienation and increasing difficulties in pulling off a put-together professional facade, we realise that the hotel is slowly eating her alive, and even her inner certainties are fragile.

Things come to a head as Eva falls under the spell of the imperious, eccentric Contessa (a very good Krista Kosonen, channeling Helena Bonham Carter at her kookiest). This kimono-wearing guest defiantly smokes indoors, flirts with a ballet dancer who has checked into another room, and takes delivery of clandestine envelopes from desperate petitioners. Commanding every space she enters, she seems uncowed by her rumoured criminal record. Some of her sense-defying affectations — petting an invisible pet dog, and speaking Old Norwegian on the telephone — feel extraneous, as they push weirdsville flourishes to a peak, but details that don’t quite land do not scupper the overall sense of unsettling otherworldliness that the film succeeds in conjuring, helped by close, claustrophobic camera angles and an ominous, droning soundscape courtesy of Roman Kurochkin that seems haunted by echoes from another realm.

When Eva makes overtures to involve herself in an illegal euthanasia enterprise linked to the premises as a way out of her stasis, it brings other risks and a deeper vulnerability. This is the kind of Venice descended from Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, a site of disturbing visions and Gothic uncanniness, even if the city outside is largely only heard as a storm through the walls, until the final scenes. What all of this existential malaise, suppressed desire and transactional exchange over life and death ultimately means remains opaque in a film of fleeting impressions and moments, but as a kind of waystation or purgatory between various roads in its inhabitants’ journeys, the hotel’s dark recesses offer a thrilling, enigmatic diversion for devotees of the strange.

Director, screenwriter, producer: Juja Dobrachkous
Cinematographer: Veronica Solovyeva
Editor: Andrey Klychnikov
Cast: Krista Kosonen, Oskar Grzelak, Kacper Grzelak
Sound Design: Roman Kurochkin
Production company: Twice a Day (UK), Rosa Salva (Italy)
Sales: Atoms & Void
Venue: Rotterdam (Harbour)
In English, Italian
107 minutes