Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)

Drew Goddard's Bad Times at the El Royale arrives dressed as a 1969 neo-noir: seven strangers, one decaying motel straddling the California-Nevada line, a bag of money beneath the floorboards. It is a gumbo, as the director himself has called it, and like most gumbo it is hearty, overlong, and difficult to finish in one sitting. The ensemble is led in part by Cynthia Erivo as Darlene Sweet, a soul singer rehearsing for a Reno gig, and the cast around her is notably multiracial for a period piece of this vintage. The diversity sits inside the story without announcement, which is its own quiet virtue.

The film grants Darlene and the Summerspring sisters real agency, and Darlene's climactic dressing-down of the cult leader carries genuine force. But no thesis is attached to it, no message pinned to the frame. A Black woman navigating a white, male-dominated world in 1969 carries implicit weight, and the film lets that weight rest where it falls instead of lifting it up for inspection. The Hoover-era surveillance apparatus and the corrupt hotel offer a mild institutional critique, though nobody is organizing a revolution over the slot machines.

Where the film does lean toward sermonizing, it sermonizes about morality, faith, and redemption, and even then it prefers to dramatize those ideas through genre mechanics. Characters carry PTSD, addiction, and dementia, framed as trauma and decline, not as identity. There is no environmental content, no body-positivity thread, no LGBTQ+ presence, and the incriminating film reel of a fallen idol stays deliberately anonymous. It is a picture with progressive instincts and almost no program, which in 2018 was becoming a rare and slightly lonely position.