If I can commend Mr. K for doing something well, it’s for choosing to strike a different path. Embedded as it is in the surrealist absurdities of Kafka (with touches of Genet, Beckett and Camus), along with some hints of dadaist sensibilities and an evocation of the surreal-political works of Luis Buñuel, Tallulah H. Schwab creates her own individual style set apart from her forebears and influences, something that is oddly atemporal and infused with otherworldly potentials, even when costuming and set decorations hearken back to different eras that are simultaneously lush and putrid.
This allows Schwab to use Crispin Glover, here playing a travelling magician running from one gig to the next, in a way that matches up to his rather taciturn style, allowing the sinister confines of the crumbling and labyrinthine hotel he is staying in to open up his character (certainly so that it won’t eat him up alive, which, as the plot progresses, becomes quite a real possibility). Mr. K, as he is known, arrives in the film as someone who is at once anonymous and contradictory: a performer for audiences who wants to blend into insignificance as soon as he steps offstage. He is strange and aloof, and perhaps the ideal avatar that Schwab can toss around in the spin cycle of horrors the hotel introduces, where marching bands come out of nowhere, rumbling noises seem to have no logical source, and the exit back to the front doors apparently ceases to exist, with each meandering hallway blurring into the next. How can a man as quiet and mundane as Mr. K face such indignities? For Schwab, it’s with complacence at first, but even those who don’t seem gifted for immense action have the capacity to achieve it, and it’s when Glover begins breaking out of his torpor that the film begins to come more alive, as well.
Where Mr. K does fall short, ultimately, is that its larger reveals don’t hold the same level of grandeur and risk as Schwab’s setup. It’s by design, no doubt, as a way to bring the compounding chaos into relief with a disarming gentleness (it reminded me a little of David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, albeit without the same emotion), but it feels like it’s one or two steps away from feeling completely earned. And when so much of what comes before it is excitingly imaginative, the blunted impact is all the more keenly felt.
Mr. K had its world premiere at TIFF in the Platform programme on September 7, 2024.
The Lonely Film Critic 