Credit: TIFF
by Emily DuGranrut Featured Film

Mr. K — Tallulah H. Schwab [TIFF ’24 Review]

September 10, 2024

Crispin Glover has long been a fixture of eccentricity and intrigue in Hollywood, carving out a niche for himself with a career — and personal life — that revels in the outre and offbeat. Even in more traditional roles like George McFly in Back to the Future, Glover brings a certain off-kilter verve to the proceedings. In the real world, his avant-garde books and infamous appearance on Late Night with David Letterman would seem to prove that the strange isn’t limited to his on-screen presence. In other words, idiosyncrasy seems to be the name of his game, full stop. The oddball actor’s latest, then, Tallulah H. Schwab’s Mr. K, is something of a departure from this known standard, in which Glover plays a straight man located within an increasingly inexplicable and surreal scenario.

In the film, Glover is the titular Mr. K, a traveling magician who checks into a dilapidated, labyrinthine hotel. The film opens with the eponymous character’s narrative musings on loneliness, quickly establishing Mr. K’s focus on existential dread. Initially seeking only a place to rest, Mr. K quickly discovers that the hotel is far from ordinary. As he navigates the winding hallways, which seem to shift and close in on him, he encounters a series of increasingly bizarre characters, including a brass band, elderly women in matching attire who refuse to leave the hotel, and a chef with dictatorial control over the kitchen staff (who only seem to cook variations of eggs). As it quickly becomes clear, there is no way out of this hotel, and each encounter pushes Mr. K further into a chaotic, blurred world. Tension builds, tempers flare, and pandemonium ensues.

All this havoc certainly could have paired well with Glover’s particular vein of peculiarity, but his talents are woefully underutilized in Mr. K. This is perhaps intended; Glover certainly wouldn’t be the first to attempt self-reflexive adaptation of a career-long persona. Unfortunately, as the film strives further for absurdity and tension, it only becomes more clear how a more conventionally Glover performance could have supported Mr. K’s tonal aspirations and elevated it beyond mere indie affectation.

In that absence, Schwab’s film struggles to balance all these attempts at surreality with a coherent narrative. The film certainly succeeds in establishing a palpable sense of dread and unease, with the uncanniness of its shifting hallways and unpredictable encounters working overtime, but as the plot moves toward its endpoint, it can often feel as if Schwab is more interested in laying out a series of gonzo set pieces than in tying them meaningfully together. Of course, coherence may not and doesn’t need to be the goal with something like this, but its lack would need to be utilized toward productive ends, especially considering the film’s meditations on loneliness that are introduced early on. Exploration of existential angst is ripe with potential, and especially within the confines of the sensibilities aspired to here, but in execution these ideas often feel muddled by the inconsistencies that define Mr. K — Schwab seems more intent on bewildering the audience than on delving into the emotional landscape of Mr. K’s isolation. And an over-reliance on visual style, while often captivating when taken in a vacuum, instead works to reinforce a prevailing sense of thinness elsewhere. For a film so clear in its intent to break out of the ordinary, Mr. K seems not to know they way and instead traps itself in a maze of its own making — one that’s ultimately more exhausting than exhilarating.


Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 1.