Eli Roth’s Hostel wants to hurt you. That is the point, and it is also the problem. The film, written and directed by Roth, arrived in US theaters on January 6, 2006, by way of Lions Gate Films and Screen Gems, with Falcon handling the Czech release.
Its tagline promises “Welcome to your worst nightmare,” and for its first hour it is a crude, funny, occasionally effective travel comedy about three young men behaving badly across Europe. Then it turns into something else: a dungeon, a chair, and a client who has paid for the room. The switch is the whole movie. It is also where Hostel stops being about anything except its own nerve.
Trailer, via HD Retro Trailers.
Three Backpackers and a Train to Bratislava
The setup is lean. Paxton (Jay Hernandez), Josh (Derek Richardson), and their Icelandic friend Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson) are drifting through the Netherlands — a nightclub, a brothel, a fight that gets them thrown out. Locked out of their hostel by a curfew, they take a stranger’s offer of a place to sleep. Alexei convinces them to skip Barcelona and head instead to a hostel near Bratislava, Slovakia, where, he says, beautiful women fawn over Americans.
They go. On the train they meet a Dutch businessman (Jan Vlasak) who makes an inappropriate advance on Josh. Josh flips out. The man leaves.
In Slovakia, the roommates turn out to be two women, Natalya (Barbara Nedeljakova) and Svetlana (Jana Kaderabkova). They invite the men to a spa, then a disco. Outside the disco, a gang of local Romani criminal children accosts Josh. The Dutch businessman intervenes and defends him. Josh apologizes for the train.
Then the women slip the men mickies. That is the hinge, and Roth turns it without warning.
A Chair Bolted to the Floor
Josh wakes handcuffed and shackled to a chair bolted to the floor in a dungeon-like room. Oli has already been decapitated. Yuki, the friend of a Japanese woman named Kana, is being tortured elsewhere.
The film’s second half is a machine. An organization sells people to clients who pay to torture and kill them. Rick Hoffman appears as the American Client. The Dutch businessman, who earlier stepped in to defend Josh, reads on reflection as something other than a savior — the film leaves the implication hanging without ever confirming it. Nothing about this is subtle, and Roth does not want it subtle.
What Hostel has going for it is craft in the ugly parts. The dungeon is gray and clinical, not gothic. The horror is procedural — paperwork, transactions, a man in a chair. That flatness is more unsettling than any amount of screaming, and it is the one idea the film fully commits to.
The Cast Roth Built Around Real Guys
Roth’s casting was deliberate. He wanted actors who felt like people he knew. Of Hernandez he said the performance carries a “very natural style of acting. You don’t feel like he’s acting.” He also praised Hernandez’s ability to play vulnerable, which matters, because Paxton has to hold the back half together.
The supporting pieces are a mixed bag.
- Jan Vlasak as the Dutch businessman, a Czech stage actor with limited screen credits, gives the film its only genuinely unnerving presence.
- Barbara Nedeljakova read for Vala at a Prague casting session; Roth asked her to read for Natalya instead.
- Eythor Gudjonsson was written into the part of Oli specifically, after Roth met him in Iceland while prepping Cabin Fever. Roth called him “one of the funniest guys I had ever met.”
- Jennifer Lim plays Kana, who approaches Paxton with a photo of Oli and her missing friend Yuki.
Roth’s interest in an Icelandic character came from their near-total absence in film. That is a real instinct. It also means Oli exists mostly to be killed off-screen, which wastes the funniest guy Roth ever met.
What the Movie Is Actually Selling
Hostel grossed $82 million worldwide on a $4.8 million budget. That ratio explains the sequels — Hostel: Part II in 2007, Hostel: Part III in 2011 — and a television series reportedly in development with Roth involved. Commercially, the film worked. Artistically, it is thinner than its reputation.
The first act is disposable. The jokes about sex tourism are not sharp enough to be satire and not dumb enough to be harmless. Alexei’s pitch — beautiful women who fawn over Americans — is meant to read as a trap, but Roth plays it straight for too long, and the audience is ahead of the characters by a wide margin.
The second act is where the film earns its place. The idea that atrocity is a service industry, bought and sold by ordinary men in ordinary clothes, is a genuine horror premise. Hostel does not develop it. It demonstrates it, repeatedly, and then it becomes a chase movie. Paxton’s escape is competent and forgettable.
The runtime is 94 minutes. In this paper’s view it drags in the middle and rushes the end, which is the opposite of how a horror film should be built.
The Score
Hostel is a provocation with one good idea and no interest in examining it. The dungeon sequence is effective because Roth strips it of atmosphere and leaves only transactions and a bolted chair. Everything around it — the Amsterdam prologue, the disco, the cartoonish villains — is noise.
The film’s defenders call it a commentary on torture as commodity. The film itself mostly just shows the commodity. That is not the same thing, and the gap is where Hostel loses its nerve.
It launched a franchise, made its money, and gave Roth a career. It did not give us a movie that holds up past its central image.
5.5 of 10.
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