‘The Souffleur’ Review: Willem Dafoe Anchors Gastón Solnicki’s Vienna Reverie

For those lucky enough to know it—and luckier still to have stayed there—the InterContinental Hotel in Vienna carries something epic about it, a certain unlikely grandeur. It is not a historic building, not even close. In fact, within the city’s deeply traditional urban landscape, its shape feels almost like a modernist provocation: a massive rectangular structure built in 1964 across from the Stadtpark which, with its ice-skating rink behind it, resembles a giant cruise ship drifting through the middle of the city. That hotel is the gravitational center of The Souffleur, a film that playfully leans into that mythology to tell the story of a character—and a world—that seems on the verge of disappearing.

Archival footage of the hotel’s construction and of people skating on its rink appears more than once throughout this film—curiously, for many, an Argentine one. Directed by Gastón Solnicki, the filmmaker behind Papirosen and someone with a long-standing relationship with the Austrian capital, the film has a narrative thread that connects it to Argentina, but is essentially an international co-production bringing together talents from different parts of the world. Its lead actor is none other than Willem Dafoe, by now a true globetrotter of international cinema, constantly alternating between high-profile productions (Poor Things, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Nosferatu, The Phoenician Scheme) and more idiosyncratic international projects such as The Birthday Party, Inside, Finally Dawn and Late Fame, among many others.

Dafoe plays Lucius Glanz, the hotel’s long-time manager, a man who for decades has overseen everything related to its inner workings and, at times, personally dealt with some of its guests. Melancholic and reserved, Lucius is shaken by a sudden announcement: the hotel is being sold to a buyer who plans to completely overhaul it. All signs point to the new owner having no need for his services. Lucius himself isn’t sure he wants to remain under the new management anyway, especially since the buyer—an Argentine named Facundo (a name that amuses Lucius for obvious phonetic reasons), played by Solnicki himself—immediately rubs him the wrong way.

“This is the house I live in, and the one I’m being forced to leave,” Lucius says in a voiceover that drifts in and out of a film that avoids classical narrative construction—Solnicki rarely works within that model—and instead unfolds as a series of observations, wanderings and poetic figures revolving around the character, the hotel, and a constellation of employees, guests and even family members. One of them is his daughter Lilly Glanz (Lilly Lindner), who works at the hotel and shares with him a strained, silence-filled relationship.

Solnicki surrounds Dafoe with a gallery of characters he briefly encounters and shares fleeting moments with. Many of them introduce themselves directly to the camera, and more than once the film includes references or situations tied to Argentina. Not only through Facundo—here portrayed as a dilettante more interested in playing tennis and drinking than in business—but also through scattered remarks and secondary figures that drift in and out of the story. Passengers, hotel workers, waitresses and other inhabitants of this microcosm gradually emerge as Solnicki’s camera moves through lounges, rooms, rooftops and the building’s seemingly endless corridors.

The filmmaker’s camera, alongside that of his longtime Portuguese cinematographer Rui Poças (Tabu, Zama), also ventures into the city itself: the Stadtpark, nearby streets, historic buildings, and several aerial shots that help situate the enclosed universe in which Lucius appears to live. The familiar precision and elegance of the film’s visual compositions fit Vienna perfectly at first glance. At the same time, the hotel’s rationalist architecture—and the spaces Dafoe moves through—offers a different angle on the city. It is in the hotel’s most traditional bar that Vienna’s opulence truly seems to seep through the walls, and it is there that some of the film’s most significant scenes and conversations take place.

Within this warm, uneven, playful and slightly off-center narrative lies a story about a city, its buildings, and its inhabitants—figures seemingly caught between past and present, between two eras and two worlds. Vienna, in that sense, is an ideal setting: a city revered for its history, traditions and palatial grandeur, but also one that sustains a vibrant, contemporary culture. In a cryptic yet light-footed way, The Souffleur attempts to reconcile those traditions. In the hotel’s corridors, past, present and future walk side by side, like ghosts joined—and separated—by time.