Room 212 is a 2023 film from studio Dorcel and one of my favourite directors, Liselle Bailey. It stars Carollina Cherry as Avril, housekeeper at a luxury hotel, and focuses on her unconventional interactions with her colleagues and the guests.
Like a previous Liselle Bailey film I reviewed, Pretty Lovely Lies, this is also set in the English seaside town of Hastings. In the first couple of minutes, we see various sights, which I shall now document.
We are first introduced to Avril with a shot of her sitting at a bus shelter, using her phone and smoking a cigarette. Her smoking habit is actually somewhat significant to the story. For anyone wishing to visit it, the bus stop in question is St Leonards.
Eventually, Bus 21 arrives, and Avril moves to board it. Bus 21 is a Stagecoach South East service that runs between St Helens and Ore. In the screenshot, we can see that the fleet number of this particular bus (a Scania N230UD ADL Enviro400) is 15551, and so we are able to look up its details and check its full numberplate, GN59 EXA. A couple (1, 2) of Tweets from Samantha Bentley (whom I'll come back to later), suggests production took place on 28th April 2023. With this, we can see what services it operated on that day. We can also find a photo of that bus taken just a couple of days later, and sure enough, the advert on the side of the bus matches.
Next, we see Avril walking through Warrior Square Gardens, which looks lovely. This is where things start to not make much sense because the Gardens are literally opposite the bus stop that Avril was waiting at. Did she decide not to board the bus she was queueing for? Why was she waiting at a bus stop when she didn't need a bus? It's also not clear why Avril is now walking towards the bus stop she was previously at. These are but the first of several mysteries that aren't properly resolved.
Avril then enters the nearby Best-One convenience store to buy some chocolate. The store proudly shows off its "very good" food hygiene rating, which it received on 19th October 2022, although that's not so difficult to do for a convenience store.
Avril subsequently sits at a shelter to consume the chocolate, then has another smoke.
After all that, Avril finally shows up at the hotel where she works. In reality, it is the holiday house Zanzibar, and this is the setting for the majority of the film. Looking back at the film's initial drone shot, we can see that all the aforementioned locations are located a short distance from each other:
Anyway, the rest of the film basically shows Avril going about her work, cleaning rooms and serving guests. And fucking them, too. There's a lot of fucking going on at this hotel.
One pleasant surprise is that Samantha Bentley (told you I'd get back to her) makes a cameo appearance as a stripper. She had quit porn for some years, but although she has no sex scenes here, she does get her tits out, which is something at least.
The characters in this film have quite a bit of depth, and the story is rather engaging. Carollina puts on a superb performance (it's also a very fitting role for her, as she actually used to work at a hotel). I also appreciate the high production values exhibited.
I highly recommend Room 212. However, there's one more mystery: why is that the title of the film? I don't think they mention a Room 212 in the film at all. Oh well. There are some questions that will never be answered.
★★★★☆ 4/5