Critics Campus 2025 participant Monique Nair traverses the oneiric, artfully punk milieu of Robina Rose’s third and final film, Nightshift: a mood piece that illuminates the hidden worlds of hotel guests and staff.

A receptionist sits behind a desk: still, statuesque, a textured piece of hotel decor. Her gaze is impassive. She is adorned with a stack of earrings and chunky accessories – a hint of punk, yet restrained enough for service work. She is the central figure in Robina Rose’s 1981 film Nightshift, an evocation of a young woman’s quiet labour, of transient guests, fleeting encounters and liminal spaces. Is it a look of absence in her eyes, or perhaps she’s deep in a dream?

Rose’s third and final film was born from her own experience of working at the Portobello Hotel in Notting Hill, and is shot in the same location with a crew of friends and colleagues from London’s countercultural underground. It was written with a friend, artist and former Portobello colleague Nicola Lane. A compelling and distinctive work, Nightshift forms part of the broader British avant-garde cinema movement of the 70s and 80s, and is a snapshot of London’s subversive arts scene.

We follow the receptionist’s mundane tasks and a succession of hotel guests checking in and moving around the space between sunset and sunrise. Members of a boisterous punk band mill around the front desk. A pipe-smoking drunk man clad only in a dressing gown and underwear strolls in and out. The chef drops by to rant about difficult customers. Jazz musicians break into an impromptu jam. In the lounge, a glamorous countess gets vulnerable on a call, asking, “Aunty, do you love me?”

A hotel is a site of transit, in-betweenness and anonymity. It’s a place where people are suspended temporarily, where emotions can be heightened. Private conversations and emotions exist in a context that is neither private nor public. In Nightshift, the Portobello offers an ephemeral and anonymous space where characters can carry their burdens up and down the shadowy-red lift.

Nightshift

What happens, for the most part, takes place under the eye of the receptionist. It is her experience of this night shift: the guests’ lives she bears witness to, the mundane routine of work and the labour of passivity. The film moves with the rhythms of the space, the unpredictable flow of patrons and their moods, and the banal regimen of hotel night work: checking clients in, cling-wrapping croissants, counting coins, vacuuming, waiting with an unnerving stillness. People talk at her, but she never verbally responds to their rants, confessions, questions or declarations.

As the receptionist watches on, the red-gold haze of the visuals evokes a dreamlike quality and a blurring of time that bring into question what is real. After she is seen taking a nap on a couch, there is an intimate reveal of the guests’ experiences within their rooms. The music-box lullaby score that opens the film returns. The gentle tinkling sounds stitch the sequence together as we float between residents’ deeply personal moments: two men drunkenly arguing and playing poker; a woman sitting in the shadows, staring at a TV; a young girl fixing the hair and make-up of a doll; a group of pillow-fighting women giggling and frolicking in golden light, feathers flying through the air in lush slow motion.

The unnamed receptionist is played by London icon Jordan (born Pamela Rooke), who was famous for working in Vivienne Westwood’s boutique Sex, frequently attending early Sex Pistols concerts and paving the way for punk fashion. She previously collaborated with Derek Jarman (The Last of England, MIFF 1988) – another notable filmmaker of 1970s and 80s British avant-garde cinema – appearing in his films Sebastiane (1976) and Jubilee (1978). In Nightshift, Jordan’s stylised presence brings a sense of personality to the receptionist’s restraint. We get a glimpse of a considerable life lurking beneath the performance of servitude.

The unreadability of the receptionist’s face offers an openness. Is it expressionless, or is it a stoic melancholy? Could all these things be happening inside her head? Is it speculation, a fever dream, her notion of how the guests would spend the early hours of the morning? It is easy to slip into imaginings in the isolation of repetitive tasks, or in response to the overbearing presence of work. Whatever is taking place, it fleshes out the inner realities of each of these characters – not to mention that of the receptionist – and draws us into their vulnerabilities. Every internal or relational moment of struggle or connection exists simultaneously, each just a wall away from the other.

As her shift ends and light streams in from the windows, life enters her face for the first time, and the receptionist finally breaks into a smile. Her departure is framed through the door of the Portobello Hotel. There’s a sense of temporary respite, but also a knowledge that this night of work and witnessing is just one of many. In a film of nocturnal sensibility, Rose has created a vivid liminal world where the hotel conceals multitudes of human emotions, mysteries and possibilities.

Nightshift screens on Saturday 16 August as part of the MIFF 2025 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.