An unsettling drone hums underneath nearly every scene of Juja Dobrachkous’s sophomore film Accept Our Sincere Apologies, a sound signaling that even seemingly innocuous moments are edged with menace. It’s the soundtrack of a mind closing in on itself, restlessly circling within its self-imposed trap. This trap is both metaphorical and literal: the film centers on Eva (Oskar Grzelak), the general manager of an opulent Venetian hotel that, for reasons she never fully articulates, does not or cannot leave. A quasi-narrative, impressionistic rendering of an unravelling mind — a classically Gothic setup, rendered by Dobrachkous with appropriate eeriness — Accept Our Sincere Apologies is alternately mystifying and absorbing.
The hotel itself, and the manner in which it is shot, is at least as important as the oblique plot and characterizations. Dobrachkous never shows the hotel’s exterior, instead providing glimpses into rooms, corridors, and common areas, including a check-in desk that stands in front of an archaic wall of keys. Director of photography Veronica Solovyeva shoots these spaces with crisp, black-and-white digital photography. The widescreen frames can capture panoramic interiors and winding halls, yet Solovyeva often opts for tight close-ups with jittery, handheld camerawork. The hotel, then, reads as a simultaneously cavernous and cloistered space; befitting of Eva’s narrow perspective, it appears to the viewer as a sprawling maze that teems with dead ends.
Eva presents as a hypercompetent administrator, delegating tasks with brisk efficiency and managing any number of guests’ absurd complaints, yet underneath her professional exterior she is jittery at best and despondent at worst. Her voiceover overlays much of the film, mostly consisting of literary, introspective musings — “when even death turns away, what will be left for you?” — and Dubrachkous also shows Eva in a number of private, harried moments sleeping in hotel rooms that she is clearly not meant to be occupying. Eva becomes embroiled with a mysterious guest, Contessa (Krista Kosonen, the only professional actor in the cast). Contessa is an eccentric with an imaginary dog, and Eva quickly latches on to her. Contessa, though, has a checkered past that mired her in legal troubles, and it becomes clear that Eva wants Contessa to pull her out of her own psychological unmooring through ethically murky means.
The relationship between Eva and the Contessa, which develops in conjunction with Eva’s progressively deteriorating mental state, is the film’s main narrative thread, but is doled out slowly and subtly. Many important narrative elements are only gestured at, and Dobrachkous often lingers on scenes that seem to serve aesthetic or thematic purposes, aside from simple plot development. One of the film’s most notable quirks is that Eva claims to have absorbed a twin in the womb, and she has repeated visions of this twin walking, dancing, and speaking with her. The twin is played by Kacper Grzelak, Oskar’s own twin — the brothers are Polish models, and both bring a willowy, intense presence to their paired roles.
Dobrachkous sustains an impeccably oneiric, mysterious mood throughout Accept Our Sincere Apologies, bolstered by Solovyeva’s evocative cinematography, and the cast of largely nontraditional performers are fascinating both individually and collectively. Yet, like many films with an experimental bent that screen at international festivals, Dobrachkous’s film sometimes suffers from its vacillations between narrative and non-narrative techniques. Dobrachkous has given the film a conventional narrative arc that she repeatedly obscures in favor of aesthetic gestures, and as a result, the film’s internal coherence sometimes suffers. Accept Our Sincere Apologies, though, is ultimately so visually and aurally striking, and features such a distinct film-world with its liminal hotel populated by ghostly eccentrics, that the sum is ultimately more compelling than it is cryptic.
Published as part of IFFR 2026 — Dispatch 3.
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