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“Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you.”–Rainier Maria Rilke

Mr. K is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Tallulah H. Schwab

FEATURING: Crispin Glover

PLOT: A magician planning to spend one night in a hotel finds it impossible to leave.

COMMENTS: Mr. K clearly has a lot of time to contemplate the universe within. In a brief yet moving introductory sequence, he performs his magic act, setting a miniature solar system in orbit, for an audience who couldn’t be less interested. He then checks into a hotel, planning to move on after one night. As the title’s nod to Franz Kafka indicates, K. instead falls into a trap of Kafkaesque absurdity, though the weirdness here is of the paint-the-numbers variety.

It quickly becomes obvious the hotel exists as a world unto itself. After losing his way while trying to find the lobby, K. meets a string of eccentric characters, all of who impart tidbits of wisdom K. barely has the patience to listen to before he’s corralled back into his room by a roving brass band. On a second attempt to escape, he ends up in the room of two elderly sisters who have lived in the hotel for so long without ever leaving, they’re forced to admit they can’t remember how to find the exit.

One of them mutters something about the Oracle and rumors of divinity. Mysterious graffiti reading “Liberator” is seen scrawled across the endless, identical corridors. After another thwarted attempt to leave, K. ends up in the kitchen where he’s thrown an apron and told to get cracking—eggs, that is. Despite his insistence that he’s running late for an appointment and really must be leaving, the hotel immediately subsumes K. into its rhythms.

For viewers of a certain age, this will sound like familiar territory. It brings to mind that other film wherein a savior figure, encouraged to reach his full potential by a mysterious oracle, sets about freeing the ignorance masses from the narrow confines of their reality.

At first, K. takes great pains to insist he’s perfectly ordinary and not the Liberator everyone’s whispering about (and therefore Glover’s antic potential is never fully realized). He is, however, the only person in the entire hotel who’s concerned about the strange noises coming from the walls. Leaking pipes take the blame for periodic bouts of structural groaning and dripping wallpaper. After a House of Leaves-style investigation into the measurements of the rooms, K. realizes the building, despite being bigger on the inside, is also steadily getting smaller.

K. desperately tries to convince his few friends to assist with his seemingly futile quest to find the exit, but they’re satisfied with their existence in the hotel. Why would they want to leave? It provides everything they need, and with the gourmet meals continually being served, it seems there could be worse places to be trapped (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie with quite so many food stylists listed in the credits).

K. continues mapping the hotel on his own, even as detractors work to sabotage his progress. With the discovery of what’s really going within the hotel’s walls, the story veers onto slightly weirder, though still familiar, territory. As the journey deepens, Mr. K asks a lot of questions but provides no answers. It’s left open-ended enough for the viewer to decide on their own interpretation if, by the end, they’re still interested.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Glover’s baggy role doesn’t really suit his weird charms… while casting Glover as a reluctant everyman takes admirable chutzpah, there’s not much to ‘Mr. K beyond its second-hand surrealism and strained counter-mythmaking.”–Simon Abrams, RogerEbert.com (contemporaneous)

Mr. K [Blu-ray]

• Region A Blu-ray

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