I suspect "Hotel Dunsmuir" will divide audiences pretty harshly, but I really liked it. Jen Jandreau plays Billie, a young women who is dealing with a seriously abusive husband. After a particularly unpleasant event, she finally gets up the courage to leave him and go stay with her grandmother.
During her travels she stays a night in Dunsmuir, California at a hotel named the "Hotel Dunsmuir." In an unfortunate coincidence, she runs into a friend of her husband and makes up an awkward excuse as to why she's alone. But during the night, weird, possibly supernatural events start to happen, and she decides to get away as quickly as she can. She also meets a fellow abuse survivor and agrees to take her along on the drive...
As I said, this movie is going to divide viewers. I'm calling it a "slow burn" but that doesn't really communicate how much of a slow burn it is. Part of what makes the movie work so well is Jet Jandreau, who is a revelation here -- she is enormously appealing in the role and gives the character enough emotional weight that we are really, actively rooting for her. That makes the scares and dangers more effective when they show up (and they do show up). And while there are a lot of times where it appears not much is happening, we know her rat of a husband is looking for her and there are sounds in the background that make the sequences really suspenseful.
It's not perfect, of course. Billie is a beautiful, smart, sweet, and pious woman. There's no indication of why she would abandon her life to go live in the sticks with this hideously abusive redneck. Some of the story resolution is probably going to be pretty obvious to viewers. And we have the old "important stuff happens in the poor light so we can't actually see what happened" issue that plagues so many low budget films.
But overall, it hit all the notes for me. As I said, serious slow burn territory so if that turns you off, this might not be the flick for you. But gets a pretty strong recommendation from me.
