Nicolas Winding Refn is the crazy Danish bastard who directed Bronson and Valhalla Rising, so I’m gonna buy whatever he sells. He also did Drive and the kabuki fever dream Only God Forgives, which if nothing else was a stylish misfire. His next film is entitled The Bringing, and it sounds weird.
The Bringing is based on occurrences at L.A.’s Cecil Hotel, which has a history of the macabre. Its latest claim to infamy was the incident involving Elisa Lam, a woman who was found dead in a water tank on the hotel’s roof. Before she died, however, Lam was captured on camera behaving strangely in a hotel elevator.
The script follows a man investigating her death.
So, we’re all agreed that Ryan Gosling is playing the man, right?
Here’s a picture of the Cecil Hotel:
It doesn’t exactly look like the Overlook, but the Cecil has a long and storied history of death. It’s been the site of multiple suicides since its construction in 1927 (including one involving a woman leaping to her death and landing on a pedestrian, who also died), and in the 1980s Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez was a guest there. So was Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger. I think in Refn’s capable hands, The Bringing could be seriously scary. We’ll be keeping an eye on this one.
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