Love Hotel (New 2K Restoration)
Opens September 5, 2025
A call girl and a married man with a debt to the yakuza have a violent rendezvous in a cheap love hotel. Years later, haunted by the memory of that night, they reconnect and begin a strange love affair. New 2K restoration.
A tale of two broken souls. A call-girl named Yumi, “night-blooming flower,” and Tetsuro, a married man with a debt to the yakuza, have a violent rendezvous in a cheap love hotel. Years later, haunted by the memory of that night, they reconnect and begin a strange love affair. Determined to finish what they started, they return to the scene of their first macabre passion. With a taste for wicked absurdity while coursing with undercurrents of operatic emotion, at times verging on a musical, Love Hotel is moved by the irrational forces that attract two bodies together. It’s a film with a uniquely materialist sense of eros manifested in Shinji Somai’s long takes, each shot a tightrope-like predicament flushed with earthly tension and live-wire physicality. Made in the same year as Typhoon Club, this elegiac erotica is one of Somai’s most bewitching and unnervingly romantic works, the high-water mark of Nikkatsu Studio’s legendary Roman Porno cycle of films.
- Director: Shinji Somei
- Principal Cast: Noriko Hayami, Minori Terada, Kiriko Shimizu, Nobutaka Masutomi, Rie Nakagawa
- Country: Japan
- Year: 1985
- Running Time: 88 min.
- Producer: Yoshiyuki Kaino
- Screenplay: Takashi Ishii
- Cinematographers: Tadashi Miura, Katsuji Oyamada, Noboru Shinoda
- Editors: Isao Tomita
- Language: Japanese
- Has Subtitles: Yes