‘Motel Destino’ Review: Karim Aïnouz’s Horned-Up Neon-Noir Keeps Its Cool While Getting Hot and Heavy
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic Welcome to the Motel Destino, which may be some distance from the Hotel California, but is very much programmed to receive — or give, if that’s your preference.
With mirrors on the ceiling but definitely no pink champagne on ice, the run-down roadside sex den that houses most of Karim Aïnouz’s Olympically horny new film isn’t so much a palace of pleasure as a this-will-do hideaway for the illicitly amorous couples (or throuples, or more, no judgment here) checking into any of its hastily wiped-down rooms.
It’s a dream setting, however, for one of the most sweat-drenched neo-noirs — or neon-noirs, in this case, given its eye-scorching tropical palette — to hit the screen since Kathleen Turner and William Hurt soaked through their shirts in “Body Heat.” As an erotic thriller, it’s more preoccupied with the first half of that term than the second, and that’s just fine.
Slow like honey and heavy with mood — to quote Fiona Apple, though she left out the relevant descriptors “oozy” and “sticky” — “Motel Destino” is correspondingly light on plot, to the point that it feels like a cheeky genre experiment: a film in which all the noirish types and tropes are present and correct, but everyone’s just too damn hot and bothered and oversexed to get much killing done.
Read more on variety.com