1999: German filmmaker Heinrich Sabl, known for his pre-2000 stop-motion animation, begins work on his first animated feature, Memory Hotel. Twenty-five years later, the film has its world premiere at DOK Leipzig, earning a Special Mention in the International Competition Animated Film (see the news). The filmmaker is a veritable jack of all trades, taking on the roles of writer, director, cinematographer, editor and producer in what is clearly a sort of chef-d’oeuvre, despite it being his feature debut. In the dark, folkloric tradition of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, Memory Hotel is hardly ever a happy tale, with its characters almost exclusively stuck in Sabl’s eerie dollhouse playground outfitted with extraordinary detail.

As World War II draws to a close, five-year-old Sophie (voiced at different ages by Elsa Seusing, Svenia Liesau and Dagmar Manzel) and her parents (Florian Lukas and Steffi Kühnert) flee Germany with the intention of sailing to the USA, only for the parents to be unexpectedly killed when they stumble into the eponymous hotel, where they come face to face with Nazi officer Scharf (Milton Welsh) and a member of the Hitler Youth, Beckmann (Milan Peschel). Soviet paratrooper Wassili (Anton Peisakhov) is the first to arrive at the hotel; then comes a general (Sergej Gladkich) and a group of soldiers, who make the lodging their new home for the next decades. This is where the young Sophie thus grows up, raised in servitude to prepare meals for the Soviet soldiers. As she grows up, she becomes the unobtainable prize in a twisted battle between Wassili, Scharf and Beckmann, the last of whom has hidden in the walls of the hotel since the death of Sophie's parents.

Sabl’s work has a base mechanical quality, ranging from the imposing kitchen machinery to the film’s key device, the hotel's dumbwaiter lift. To derive a pinch of joy, Sophie imagines the tippy-tapping, cymbal-clapping monkey toy in the jukebox dancing with her, while the occupying machine-like Soviet soldiers, whose joints can physically be seen, move and creak like children's toys. Beyond him and his animation team's dedication to detail, Sabl’s role as cinematographer is what truly shines through. It's clear he has spent a painfully long time selecting every small movement and unexpected angle, daring to treat his camera as adventurously as if the characters themselves were alive under the gaze of his watchful lens. With their complexions ranging from cream to porcelain-white, his characters’ faces are contorted in unsettlingly inscrutable expressions, instead showing emotion mainly through the eyes, voices and other nimble puppet movements.

Sabl leans into the disturbing and grim fable-like nature of the story, where the Soviet general forces Wassili and the teenage Sophie to marry as she works day and night for the soldiers. Its deliberately unbelievable elements — from the amount of time Beckmann spends in the walls stealing food for himself to the amount of time that passes as Sophie grows up, from 1945 to 1969 and beyond — re-emphasise the idea of a fairy tale with no way out. However, the film's script is where the film ultimately starts to go off the rails, sidetracking during an overly long middle section while turning more abstract, leading to nearly a half-hour of material that belabours the same points around the three men. At times, the horrors of the hotel’s occupants don’t seem to be stressed quite enough, whereas Sophie appears blasé in response. 

This stunningly animated yet peculiarly paced portrait of a young woman trapped, doomed to suffer intergenerational horrors in perpetuity, attempts to grapple with lingering trauma left by both German and Soviet legacies. By the end, Memory Hotel acts more as a cautionary tale around patriarchal entitlement, where the possessiveness of the three men as they declare Sophie as “mine” will send shivers down your spine.

Memory Hotel is a Franco-German co-production staged by Heinrich Sabl Filmproduktion in cooperation with Parisienne de Production, Arte France Cinema, Zweites Deutsches Fersehen (ZDF) and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR).