Usually, when a film makes you want to visit the location in which it was shot, it implies sunny Mediterranean coastlines or dramatic, isolated scenery. But a decaying, pulsating hotel that won’t let you leave? Surely, that’s the stuff of nightmares. And yet, Oslo-born director Tallulah Hazekamp Schwab draws you into the eccentric and absurd world of her single location film so perfectly that you cannot help but wonder what it would be like to step inside … 

Mr. K is only Hazekamp Schwab’s second feature length film in the past ten years. It centres around the titular character (played by Crispin Glover), a lonely illusionist with an appointment to make. But when he checks in at a mysterious hotel, he realises that he is stuck there. The guests and staff talk about an oracle and “The Liberator”. But can anyone make it out of the never-ending corridors and, more to the point, does anyone want to? 

Hazekamp Schwab creates a world that looks as if it’s come straight from the imagination of Guillermo del Toro by way of Franz Kafka and Tim Burton. The score alternates between a throbbing pulse, whimsical jazz, romantic strings and sound effects akin to screaming. The ever so fluid camera work gives the hotel walls a heartbeat of their own, with dramatic pull back shots emphasising the scale of the labyrinthine corridors. The colour palette is earthy and muddy – all moss greens, walnut browns, toasted ochre and hessian creams – as if to underline the fact that the hotel is a living, breathing thing. 

The production design, set and costumes are a visual feast. There is a hopeful symmetry amongst their seeming chaos. Although everything is slicked with a lifelong dust and grime, the hotel is still a spectacle to behold. A potentially haunted one, granted, but still a spectacle. There are lots of beautifully choreographed crowd sequences that, again, stress the notion that the hotel has its own rhythm. Pipes clatter and hiss; lights flicker on and off; walls groan with water and shrink in the night. There are slithering, slurping root-like intestines buried within every wall. It’s a disorientating, hallucinatory and unsettling ode to the fantastical. 

Carrying us through all this confusion is Crispin Glover. His character opens the film with an existential monologue on loneliness. He is shy; awkward. And this is reflected in his bag of tricks. They are small and gentle – such as producing a flower or juggling eggs. He is not sawing anyone in half. He spends most of the film exasperated; searching for answers, positioning him firmly with the audience. Everyone else seems to know the routine of the hotel. There are obvious expectations of behaviour that he cannot ever seem to anticipate. As a result, he is looped into one absurd situation after another, with his whispered sighs of, “time to go,” being utterly ignored. It’s an endearing and engaging performances from Glover, whose determination and strength grows as the film progresses. 

He is supported by a wonderful array of character actors. Sunnyi Melles is a flamboyant artist in residence; Bjørn Sundquist is a demented chef who simply cannot keep up with the demands of the hotel; Fionnula Flanagan and Dearbhla Molloy are sisters who dress identically and chain smoke their way through a conversation. Jan Gunnar Røise, as egg cracker Anton, is warm and friendly – the closest thing Mr. K has ever known to a friend. He is ambitious for his life within the hotel kitchen … but can he see beyond it? 

Whether intentional or not, the film has strong allegorical strands to its story. It feels like part fairytale, part nightmare. Mr. K suddenly finds his hotel room packed with guests who are eating his food and destroying his blueprints for escape. Despite the whispers of a much-needed “Liberator”, no one seems all that determined to leave. “We didn’t need an exit before you came,” one disgruntled guest says. Hazekamp Schwab seems to present a situation where no one can see (or wants to see) the decay that has quite literally set in around them; where the idea of freedom is more important than actually achieving it. When offered rational help and support, the guests, en masse, choose to reject it, happier to wallow in the familiar. They greet their liberator with scorn and abuse, destroying all clues to an exit route. 

With a gloriously inexplicable and absurd ending, Mr. K keeps you engaged and confused right up until the credits roll. It’s a sumptuous film to look at, with Crispin Glover’s performance grounding things ever so slightly in reality. If you enjoy films that don’t give you all the answers but instead encourage you to truly immerse yourself in another world, Mr. K is worth the watch. A curious little gem of a film. 

Mr. K is screening at the Glasgow Film Festival 2025. Get your tickets and find out more here.