checked in alone

Films set in hotels and motels, about people staying alone far from home. Some check in to hide, some for work, and some to start their lives over.

In Psycho, Marion Crane is hiding: she has run off with forty thousand dollars of her employer's money, and a storm drives her off the highway and into the Bates Motel. In Lost in Translation, Bob Harris is in Tokyo for work, filming a whiskey advert, and spends his time with Charlotte, another American at the same hotel who is left on her own while her husband works. The work goes worse in Barton Fink: a New York playwright hired to write for the movies sits in the run-down Hotel Earle with a Wallace Beery wrestling picture due and a typewriter that stays silent.

For Yorgos in Strella, starting over begins in a cheap hotel in Athens, on his first night out after fourteen years in prison. For some guests the stay has no end date. Halley and her six-year-old daughter Moonee live in a budget motel outside Disney World in The Florida Project. The motel does not allow long stays, and the manager, Bobby, lets them live there anyway because they have nowhere else to go. The Lobster gives the stay a deadline instead: single people are sent to a hotel and have 45 days to find a partner, or they are turned into an animal. Whatever brought them there, you spend the film in the room with them.