The Souffleur
Drama • 2025 • 1h 18m
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
After three decades running a landmark hotel in Vienna, Lucius discovers that the building has been sold to an Argentine developer determined to tear it down and reinvent it. With the support of his daughter and a small circle of loyal staff, he clings to the life he has built. What unfolds is a battle of detours, intrigue, and a paranoid fight to protect a fading world — and the only home he has ever known.
Gastón Solnicki’s The Souffleur unfolds as a quiet yet restless meditation on what it means to hold on when the world insists on moving forward. The story of Lucius, a hotel manager clinging to the last vestiges of his life’s work, resonates as more than narrative—it becomes an allegory of modernity devouring tradition, and of memory resisting erasure.
The director’s own words echo throughout the film: his sense of being a foreigner attempting to crystallize what is fading. The collaboration with Willem Dafoe feels like an act of counterpoint itself, a meeting of dissonant voices that produces unexpected harmonies. The film often behaves like music—expanding in multiple directions, building subtle correspondences, allowing sound to become as decisive as image.
What seems at first a straightforward tale slowly reveals a polyphonic texture, where detail and atmosphere carry as much weight as plot. As one character insists on saving a building, the film whispers a deeper question: what, if anything, can be preserved?
“To conserve is not to resist time, but to give it shape.” Watching The Souffleur, one feels that “the past survives not as ruins, but as resonance.”
Philosophical without being heavy-handed, the film lingers like an unresolved chord. I liked it—precisely because it risks landing, as Solnicki says, “in the most dangerous zone,” and finds truth there.
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
— Gustav Mahler
