Review: ‘Hostel’

By Zack McGhee | Tuesday, January 10, 2006, 06:12 PM

Apologies for taking so long to comment on Hostel. Eli Roth’s follow-up to his comparatively light-hearted feature debut, Cabin Fever, begins as a Eurotrip-style teen sex comedy, then makes the most drastic and terrifying tonal shift since Takashi Miike’s Audition. Hostel follows two oversexed Americans and an Icelandic drifter who are backpacking through Europe. As the movie begins, they’re in Amsterdam’s red-light district, getting high and sleeping with prostitutes. They meet another Icelandic guy about their age. He tips them off to a Slovak hostel filled with women. “Because of the war,” he says, all the men are gone, and it will be easy for them to get laid.

Slovakia hasn’t been at war since World War II, but you can’t expect a couple of dumb Americans to know that. I didn’t until I Googled it just now. I also learned that Slovakia is often referred to as the “Country at the Heart of Europe,” although how often and by whom I’m not sure. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The Slovak hostel is, of course, a trap. When they get there, they do indeed meet some beautiful girls who are quite willing to sleep with them. They are also quite willing to split them up, drug them, and hand them over to a sadistic butcher shop where people from around the world come and pay a premium price for the opportunity to torture and kill them.

We don’t get to the butcher shop until at least half the movie is over. What’s waiting for these guys seems to be designed as a surprise. It’s not, because the marketing for the movie is built on the torture premise. Initially I thought that this was a necessary mistake — that the movie should have been marketed as the teen comedy it starts out as, so as to let the horror of the second half have its full impact. Of course, it would be impossible to market Hostel that way. At the severing of the first limb, half the audience would walk out and demand a refund. After all, this place makes Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo look like Disneyland. But what of selling an Asia extreme–style gorefest in which not a single drop of blood is shed until the third or fourth reel?

In Cabin Fever, Roth ragged on the xenophobia of suburban teens, literally infecting them with the strange, unfamiliar world of rural America, and letting it devour them from the outside in. Hostel is less about xenophobia than the capitalistic drive for excess. Its characters are lured into the trap by their insatiable desire for stimulation. They get it through sex and drugs, and the businessmen who come to the hostel will get it by torturing them. They are captured by older versions of themselves. The characters’ insatiable appetite for sex, violence and pornography is a self-destructive one. By selling the movie as a straight horror spectacle, Roth is effectively commenting on the very impulse that drives us to see his movie — the same impulse that drove him to make it.

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