THE STORY – After thirty years managing an iconic hotel in Vienna, Lucius learns the building has been sold to an Argentine developer intent on demolishing and reimagining it. With the help of his daughter and a handful of loyal employees, he clings to the life he’s built. What follows is a crusade of detours, espionage, and a paranoid struggle to preserve a vanishing world — and the only home he’s ever known.
THE CAST – Willem Dafoe, Lilly Lindner, Stephanie Argerich, Gastón Solnicki, Imona Mirrakhimova, Claus Philipp & Camille Clair
THE TEAM – Gastón Solnicki (Director/Writer) & Julia Niemann (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 78 Minutes
Willem Dafoe is one of those rare actors whose very presence can elevate even the strangest material. At seventy years old, he continues to embrace roles across the spectrum, from Wes Anderson ensembles to arthouse experiments to comic-book blockbusters, and his latest, “The Souffleur” is as peculiar as it is ambitious. Directed by Gastón Solnicki, the 78-minute tragicomedy premiered in Venice’s Orizzonti program, offering a surreal meditation on impermanence, obsolescence, and the delicate art of holding things together.
At the center of this odd tale is Lucius Glantz, the longtime manager of Vienna’s InterContinental Hotel, a modernist landmark now facing demolition after being sold to a brash realtor (played by Solnicki himself). For Lucius, the hotel is not just a job, but his identity, as it’s a space he has inhabited for three decades. When he discovers its fate, his world begins to collapse, symbolized most clearly in the hotel’s signature soufflé, which suddenly refuses to rise. Dafoe plays him with a manic yet touching desperation, obsessing over both the fate of the building and his own sense of purpose.
Solnicki laces the film with metaphors that range from clever to overdetermined. The soufflé, fragile and unpredictable, becomes an emblem of life’s impermanence. Timepieces in the hotel slip out of sync, pipes clog inexplicably, and wind imagery recurs throughout, linking Lucius’s crisis to creation myths and the fragility of human permanence. Cinematographer Rui Poças captures Vienna with a minimalist realism, favoring authentic locations over stylized sets, while Solnicki’s sound design emphasizes ambient noise (clattering kitchens, humming air vents, faint city sounds) to ground the surrealism in tactile detail.
For stretches, the film is hypnotic. There’s a faint Buñuelian flavor to the absurdism, especially in Dafoe’s heightened performance. He delivers Marx in Italian one moment, then wrestles with a collapsed dessert the next. It’s funny, melancholic, and committed in a way only Dafoe could pull off. The supporting cast, largely non-professionals, heightens the semi-documentary tone, though none of them make an impression strong enough to balance Dafoe’s magnetism.
Yet despite flashes of brilliance, “The Souffleur” never quite coalesces. What begins as a promising allegory of fragility and change slowly drifts into a series of sketches that repeat rather than deepen the central metaphor. The espionage undertones are underdeveloped, the pacing stretches thin, and the film’s brevity paradoxically makes it feel longer than it is. Dafoe’s performance elevates the material but also exposes its thinness.
Ultimately, “The Souffleur” is a fascinating but frustrating entry in Solnicki’s filmography. It continues his explorations of institutions, memory, and cultural erasure, but filtered through the star power of Dafoe, it struggles to find balance between arthouse abstraction and character-driven drama. What lingers is less the fate of Lucius Glantz or his hotel than the image of Dafoe himself: restless, eccentric, murmuring into the wind, desperately trying to make something rise.
