Bad Times at the El Royale is a repeatable formula of a movie that they should make over and over if it were up to me. Having a bunch of mysterious people meeting at a creepy location run by a creepier manager? Fantastic, sign me up everytime! Drew Goddard’s version of this movie swaggers along with lots of style for most of its running time, confidently revealing its twists and turns that made me go “Oh sh*t” more than a few times.
The El Royale is a theater bisecting the Nevada/California state lines, run by a doofus names Miles (Lewis Pullman). This particular 1969 night, 4 people surprise him, wanting to check into the hotel (it has seen better days): Catholic priest Daniel Flynn (Jeff Bridges), singer Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo), and vacuum salesman Laramie Seymour Sullivan (Jon Hamm), and hippy Emily Summerspring (Dakota Johnson). Miles provides the 4 of them rooms, where secrets start spilling out in droves.
Look I get it. It’s easy to condemn the type of onion peel storytelling Bad Times uses: “Hey I need a character to all of a sudden get REALLY good at something” “I got it! Flashback sequence where my character gets the skill they need to continue the present day plot!” More than other movies, Bad Times at the El Royale is an exercise in moviemaker manipulation of the audience. So what keeps us from rolling our eyes at it? Style and talent certainly help. Goddard is the guy who helped create things like The Good Place and Cabin in the Woods, so he’s perfectly at home creating a world for his artistic projects. Like The Good Place, his design of the El Royale is filled with lots of specificity and colors, like the clever dual state location and Overlook Hotel color palette, and the late 60s verve, especially with music (apparently Goddard is a BIG Motown fan, props!). And like Cabin, Goddard gives us a host of complex characters who might be otherwise easily placed into a type in this genre of film. Of particular note are the two relative unknowns, Cynthia Ervio and Lewis Pullman, who turn underappreciated artist and sinister quiet guy into truly complex and fascinating characters with completely satisfying arcs.
The other way Bad Times at the El Royale keeps the audience from walking out is if the twists are really good and believable in equal measure. Twists like this reshape the status quo of character power, and give us some shading of the characters so we have to replay their actions to make sure they make sense. Goddard smartly splits the story into sections based on the room number he enters, meaning there are at least 4 big reveals. For most of the movie, these reveals work extremely well, creating a dark, sinister setting and giving us some motivated understood characters to root for, that only gets MORE creepy and MORE complex as we peel away more layers. The last act loses some steam, because by that time, there’s only 1 big secret left to reveal and the true villain is not quite scary enough for the setup, so Goddard stalls for time a tad too long, but if you’re like me, you’ll forgive him because you’ve so bought into the characters that you’re tense with fear at what is going on.
I read a lot of reviews after the fact of Bad Times at the El Royale, and more than a few mentioned that this was a B-movie plot. This got me a little pissed, because it frames Drew Goddard’s mystery tapestry as something that shouldn’t be taken seriously because it’s manipulative and maybe too fun. But why do we go to the movies? To have a blast right? So for those of you who read something like that, I’m here to remind you that Bad Times at the El Royale is friggin fun! And you’ll have a great time being puppeteered by Goddard, a true magician at maximizing audience shock and excitement.