“No Tell Motel” unintentionally does something I may not have seen before in a film. When the first victim from a group of five twenty-somethings is found dead, not a single one of her friends has any sort of meaningful emotional response at all. One girl mutters “oh my God” while another wears a concerned expression with what looks like welling tears. But no one cries, screams, or otherwise noticeably reacts. In fact, not long after, the victim’s boyfriend shares a laugh with his brother’s girlfriend before trying to kiss her. Maybe all of this could be chalked up to shock. Except that two of them had the wherewithal to pull the man who ran over their friend out of his car, carry him back to the motel, and begin the search for a first aid kit.
And that is a prime illustration of how wooden the characters are in this story. Each of the five friends caught in this haunted motel has a personal secret that, through unbelievable coincidence, is connected to the story of the family whose little girl died there. Remove the individual skeleton in each closet, however, and the five of them are nearly interchangeable. Audiences may be tired with the usual grouping of high school or college friends in these scenarios: the jock, the nerd, the slut, the virgin, etc. But the uninteresting alternatives on display here make those familiar stereotypes seem far more desirable. Or at least more entertaining.
Flat personalities apparently come with an insatiable desire to wander throughout the motel on a whim. Characters come and go, enter new rooms, forget who they were looking for and go somewhere else, and generally move around often without any motivation. They wander so far away from each other that when an entire floor caves in beneath one girl’s feet, not one person is close enough to hear it happen. Either that or this is the largest, most sprawling roadside motel ever built.
