Four Rooms (1995)

Four Rooms is a New Year’s Eve comedy with the mischievous thrill of channel-surfing through four different filmmakers’ brains, all connected by Tim Roth’s beautifully frazzled bellhop as he stumbles from one escalating disaster to the next. The movie’s special trick is tone: it’s a late-night, anything-can-happen farce where the jokes land through timing, physical chaos, and the sheer pleasure of watching a decent guy try to keep his dignity while the hotel conspires against him. When it hits, it hits hard—especially in the most slapstick segment, where the mayhem builds with clockwork precision until you’re laughing at the audacity of it. It’s not for everyone (it’s crude, profane, and gleefully uneven by design), but if you like your comedy dark, kinetic, and a little dangerous, this is a cult-friendly ride worth checking in for.

Four Rooms is trying to be a New Year’s Eve comedy anthology where four directors riff on escalating bad-luck chaos through one very stressed bellhop, and on paper that’s a fun, scrappy idea. In practice, it’s wildly uneven: one segment crackles with tension and punchlines, while the others can feel like half-baked sketches that mistake loud weirdness for comedy. The humor leans heavily on shock, sleaze, and abrasive characters, so if you don’t enjoy profanity-soaked, “anything goes” scenarios with sex, gore, and cruelty-as-a-joke energy, this will test your patience. Tim Roth does admirable work holding it together, and when the movie clicks it’s genuinely entertaining, but you’ll need a high tolerance for inconsistency and a low need for likable people.