The rhetoric during retrospectives of near-future science fiction so often centres on how accurate the technological predictions were: the apparatus of the surveillance state of Orwell’s 1984 (1949) or the AI-assistant-to-lover pipeline in Her (2013). But in Abel Ferrara’s seminal erotic spy thriller, New Rose Hotel (1998), the predictions given are more expressionistic, hinging on a pre-millennium paranoia about the growing disconnect in capitalist society. In Ferrara’s future, love is mostly a mechanism for mergers and acquisitions or data retrieval. Nearly thirty years on, that sentiment chimes even truer.
Set during an unspecified future time period in neon-bathed Tokyo, freelance corporate spies Fox (Christopher Walken) and X (Willem Dafoe) make their living helping shadowy business execs poach valuable employees from rival companies. This being a Ferrara picture, their main means of headhunting involves profiling senior staff and manipulating them through the promise of sex and lavish lifestyle changes, targeted to their specific desires. With everyone involved talking of such moves as “defection”, the concept of mega-corporations as nation states is taken as a given.
Offered a $50 million fee to turn talented genetic scientist Hiroshi (Yoshitaka Amano), Fox and X hire high-end escort Sandii (Asia Argento) to seduce him—though it’s not long before X has fallen into bed with her himself. Indeed, a large chunk of the runtime is spent inside a series of hotel rooms, as they negotiate terms and simulate the performances required to convince Hiroshi to leave his wife and company behind. In an act of formal distancing, we rarely (if ever) see any of the actual spy work in practice. Only the rehearsals and rippled after effects.
Shot by long-term collaborator Ken Kelsch, New Rose Hotel matches its form to these narrative obfuscations. Its images regularly distort and decay, etched with vertical white streaks and heavy grain, close-ups captured through wobbling long lenses. Perhaps most striking is Ferrara’s fascination with the imposed intimacy of home camcorders, and the ways in which their aesthetic can imbue a performance with a sense of familiarity and closeness that was likely never there. Coupled with the borderline softcore pornography of its erotic sequences, the effect is profoundly destabilising.
In this sense, X acts as an audience surrogate, less jaded than Fox and still hopeful that his connection to Sandii is real. If there are any scenes that draw dramatic tension from the act of spying, it’s those in which X tries to peel away the layers of performance to find something approaching an authentic feeling. It’s a desperate bid for a romantic connection at the end of the world, where everyone is interested as long as there’s money involved but no one actually means what they say. How’s that for a prediction of things to come?
Special Features
- Audio commentary by co-screenwriter Christ Zois (1998)
- New interviews with director Abel Ferrara and star Asia Argento (2026, 18 and 20 mins)
- Wild and Woolly – an interview with star Willem Dafoe (2025, 8 mins)
- Interview with critic Beatrice Loayza (2026, 13 mins)
- Trailer
- Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- Reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original promotional materials
- Booklet featuring new writing on the film by Brad Stevens, author of Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision
New Rose Hotel is available in the UK now courtesy of Radiance.
