The Hall (2020)

A mystery virus affects some of the guests at a hotel, and apparently men are horrible.  Pregnant Naomi travels from Asia to the US for business, but plans to never go back so she can escape her abusive husband.  On the way into the hotel, she is almost hit by a car.  Val gets out to apologize and make sure she’s okay, while her husband glowers in the car.  Later Val’s husband tells their child that Val is the clumsiest person he knows, while threatening Val to never disagree with him again.

When her husband falls asleep early, Val tells her daughter Kelly they’re going to play a game and not to wake dad.  She sends Kelly to  the stairwell to wait as she looks for the keys to the car. 

After her husband wakes up and she hurts her ankle, Val manages to get into the hall, where she finds a number of the guests in distress. She sees a man rip out a woman’s throat. She sees people sick and dying in the hallway. 

Where most mothers would have a sense of urgency to get to their child who they sent alone to the stairwell, Val sits in the hall for awhile. Then she slowly hobbles down the hall, then gets scared and hobbles back to hide in someone else’s room, watch a newscast about the outbreak and verbally engage with a woman hiding in the bathroom. She also gets scared and sits in the hall among the sick. Good god, you don’t know how this spreads so keep away from the infected.  This is not a woman you’d want around in an emergency.

Val repeatedly screams, “are you sick??!” like a crazy woman when she encounters people dressed up for a gala in the hotel.  She also shrieks, “Everybody needs to get out of here!”  But she never offers any information about why or tries to warn them of the sick people or news report. So essentially this woman is our villain because she could have saved dozens of lives just by added a few more words to her sentence. 

At one point I wondered if this was a fever dream of an abused woman to justify her plan to leave and possibly murder her husband. But no, during the credits news reports on the deaths in the hotel are seen so it was real.  But there is no explanation of how people were sickened, why some were fine and others died, or what the real purpose of unleashing the virus would accomplish.

Find your daughter? No, I’ll hide in this room, watch a news report,
and talk to the stranger in the bathroom

Never sit in the vicinity of people dying of a mystery illness.

The worst way to open a door when your abusive husband is
outside it? Facing away from the door and looking
backwards over your shoulder.