Guests choose which state they’ll stay in, and those on the Nevada side need only cross the lobby if they want a drink.įor a variety of reasons, the movie’s arriving guests couldn’t care less about the place’s storied history. The motel’s gimmicky claim to fame is the precise and elaborate way it straddles the California-Nevada border. It takes a while to rouse the young, nervous manager, Miles Miller (Lewis Pullman), from the back room where he self-medicates. Edgar Hoover, and a newly elected President Nixon, seen fleetingly on a TV screen in the lobby of the El Royale.Ī year after losing its gambling license, the former Rat Pack hotspot is a moribund artifact. He sets the establishment-vs.-counterculture scene, sometimes with a light flourish and sometimes with heavy-handed melodrama: This is the America of Vietnam, J. But, Lynchian shadings notwithstanding, Goddard (whose credits include the screenplay for The Martian) is interested in down-to-earth thriller tropes, not otherworldly dreamscapes or free-floating evil. A hallucinatory concoction of wood and stone, surrounded by towering pines, the El Royale naturally brings to mind the Great Northern Hotel of Twin Peaks - and the fact that one character turns out to be an FBI agent amplifies the resonance. The setting earns top billing, with Martin Whist’s ace production design bringing the title establishment to vividly faded life.

El royale casino at lake tahoe