[HanCinema's Film Review] "Let's Go To Rose Motel"

A man hasn't seen his girlfriend in some time. Excited, they go to the Rose Motel- which going from the ways the movie's title sounds, is a mystical magical place synonymous with joy. As the lovers begin their negotiations for sexual intercourse, cute bits of humor and relatively tasteful pornographic voyeurism abound. Then the man discovers the terrible secret of the Rose Motel and the story gets really depressing really fast.

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The main mystery about "Let's Go To Rose Motel" which I can't figure out is who exactly is supposed to want to watch this movie. The porn comedy bits are cute, but they make up an extremely small portion of the overall film, most of the running time of which is dedicated to the horribly melodramatic story of the woman in the next room. Watching this plotline unfold is painful. It's obvious from the beginning that everything will end tragically, so it's impossible to even humor the notion of hope.

The use of the first couple as a framing device is all the more bizarre as their story is the opposite in every concievable way. They have a healthy, romantic relationship fraught with typical lover's quarrels. Nothing about these two even approaches the dreadful melancholy of the woman in the next room and the plots have no apparent thematic relation to each other. The only thing either of these characters learn is that some stranger has lived a horrible depressing life. That this plot is in the movie at all is a bit of incredulous, incomprehensible voyeurism

It's possible that this mood whiplash was intentional, but ultimately, the quality of "Let's Go To Rose Motel"'s story within in a story is pretty awful even when separated from the ill-advised framing device context. It's a fairly typical fall from grace narrative with no real interesting hooks or thrills to make it particularly worth engaging. It's cliched enough that often the story seems to be following the cliches without really bothering to guarantee that they make contextual sense first.

The movie resolves itself in the same way- rather inexplicably, without any real drama or tension, with the only apparent lesson learned being "bad things happen". The movie's cynical, pandering attitude toward giving us easily sympathetic characters contrasted against monsters makes the entire story a laughable one. And not in an amusing way- because the movie has the poor judgment to start out with cute pornography, everything that follows is just inerrantly depressing. The sex scenes especially take on a soul-crushing quality, rendering the upbeat ending even more bizarre.

If "Let's Go To Rose Motel" is doing something somehow innovative with dramatic form, I'll be darned if I have any idea what it could be. It might be possible to make a film that interestingly juxtaposes these two very different types of sex, but this movie most definitely does not accomplish that. "Let's Go To Rose Motel" is not a film I can justify recommending to any one for any reason. It leaves nothing but an empty void in the heart and soul. I can maybe recommend it as foreplay stimulation up until the second peephole, but after that this isn't a movie that will put anyone in a sexy mood.

Review by William Schwartz

"Let's Go To Rose Motel" is directed by Sin Jeong-gyoon and features Sung Eun-chae and Jang Sung-won.