Valley View Motel world première at FrightFest, 31st August 2026
“This is a true story… sort of”, reads the text that opens Kevin Ignatius and Nick Psinakis’ Valley View Motel. That ‘sort of’ is bearing a lot of load – for really this is an eccentric amalgam of tropes and motifs from different fictive films, set both in a specific backwoods Pennsylvania of the Seventies, and in a world of pure genre.
The film begins with the bloody aftermath of an armed robbery gone very wrong. There are only two survivors – the slightly injured Cliff (co-writer/co-director Ignatius) who already regrets taking part in this venture and longs to get back to his wife and teenaged daughter, and his refinery colleague Reg (Soulo Smith) who just wants to cash in on the diamonds that they have stolen. So they hole up at the remote Valley View Motel for the night before their arranged meeting with a South African fence (Michael Thyer). Staying in the room next door is Korean mother Young-ja Kang (Judy J. Lee) who, in the now-permanent absence of her debt-ridden husband, is looking for a new life while still clinging to the language and food of her homeland, while her teenaged daughter Sunny (Laura Im) has done more to assimilate and longs to break free of her mother’s traditions and grip.
Meanwhile the cheery motel owner Lester (Tom Mesmer) and his sister LouAnne (McKenzie Such) exploit the roadside business that they have inherited from their late parents to run their own extra-legal side gig, even as high-school maths teacher Hal (co-writer/co-director Psinakis) also moonlights in a line of business – contract killing – that he learnt at an early age from his mother (Janie Sharon), and is now hot on the tail of Cliff, Reg, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be in their orbit. As all these characters cross paths and narratives, violent mayhem and massacre will ensue.
Valley View Motel may be set in 1977, and its production design, Ignatius’ score and even the typography of the titles are beautifully evocative of that time, but its sensibilities come from more than one decade. Any plot involving a criminal seeking refuge in a motel immediately points to Psycho (1960), and Ignatius and Psinakis’ film not only features a murderous motelier, but a different psychopathic killer under the unhealthy influence of his mother – and Hal’s boyhood primal scene plays out in a flashback set at roughly the time of Psycho’s release. At the same time, the opening tableau of a crime scene, Hal’s sociopathic relentlessness in his pursuit of his quarry, and the chaotic clusterfuck that results, recall the structure of the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007). Meanwhile the general intersecting ensemble approach to storytelling comes straight out of the Nineties playbook of Quentin Tarantino – or more recently of films like Ryan Prows’ Lowlife (2017) and especially Drew Goddard’s similarly motel-set Bad Times at the El Royale (2018), which are both deeply indebted to Tarantino.
The film’s temporal displacement, letting it seem simultaneously to be looking back at more than one era of cinema, is in part decoded by the recurring theme of generational continuity and conflict (Hal’s and Sunny’s with their respective mothers, Lester and LouAnne’s with their parents, Cliff’s with his daughter). Here each different generation is looking back at the previous one, and either following in their footsteps or struggling, vainly it seems, to change course, while the same old forces and influences keep returning – and the future looks no more bright for the film’s youngest characters than it did for their elders. For this is a film where a “good man” easily turns bad, where happiness is elusive, where retribution never stops following crime, and where even riches do not cancel out mortality. Valley View Motel is mercurial, unhinged and often very funny. While it might have ended in any number of different ways, it still leaves us with the sense that the ending is – and must be – always fundamentally the same, with only its timing open to variation.
strap: In(n) trouble: Kevin Ignatius & Nick Psinakis’ Seventies-set post-heist caper sees different characters’ paths violently converging
© Anton Bitel
