Relationships can be difficult to navigate. Marriage, especially, can be a chore for most people. But what happens when a marriage begins to go stale? Do you and your significant other talk out your problems and work things out? Nope, the obvious answer is you cheat on them! With another married person! Because what can go wrong? Well, a lot.
One thing the film does well is the cinematography and production design. The camera work not only gives a good view of the action, but also makes the audience feel distant from the characters. This helps as with the cast being anything but likable, it helps to have distance to prevent people from sympathizing with the characters too much. The production design does a good job making the set feel like a nice motel that was mostly empty. It felt very isolated and separate from the rest of the world adding to the tension. At times, I felt the cinematography was similar to that of a Christopher Nolan film, albeit much more unpolished. However, to be compared to Nolan at all speaks volumes about Introspectum Motel's cinematography.
Even by thriller standards, this film is a slow burn. For about half the runtime, I didn't know when the thriller part would come into play. When I first saw the poster of the film, I expected that the film would involve a detective trying to investigate a series of murders taking place in different motels. After watching the film, I was a bit disappointed at the premise of the story. However, the film does get its message across: cheating is bad and will destroy your marriage. It also is very difficult to predict where the film is going, as it does a good job of implying potentially bad outcomes while not having those outcomes fully come true. While it is a revenge story, it does not get very violent despite the threat of violence being a constant presence.
Overall, despite some pretty good cinematography and decent performances, I felt that Introspectum Motel could have been much more than a simple marital-revenge story. However, for what it was, the film successfully gets its message across to the audience and feels tense especially in its latter half. I would also like to say that this film has a fair share of nudity and sex scenes, so be warned. All-in-all, would I say this is a good film? Not really, I'd say it is average at best. However, where it shines is the cinematography which makes the film look grander.