Guntur Soeharjanto, in his latest horror flick, “Panggonan Wingit” (“The Haunted Hotel” in English), literally used white paint to enhance the threat his ghost will pose to the audience. Well… yeah, it did not. The film performs well with its multi-layered story, but it was really unnecessary to color someone white to point out how society behaves toward the unique ones among us. Guntur Soeharjanto’s attempt to explain that keeping secrets from your close people is not at all a good thing is remarkable to some extent. But in this kind of horror, the creature—the ghoul, the ghost, the devil—symbolizes more than anything; sometimes, even the design of the creature supersedes the overall presentation of the horror. It is definitely a good one-time watch with flawed execution and half-baked storytelling.
Spoilers Ahead
The Haunted Hotel (2024) Plot Summary and Movie Synopsis:
The film starts with a woman who enters the Amber Mangun Hotel to join as a staff. It is her first day and she is asked to clean the rooms on the second floor. Her manager tells her twice not to go to the third floor as some renovation work is ongoing. But, since she hears someone sobbing and the sound of it is coming from a certain room on the third floor, she follows it and enters the room. There, she sees a lady with white hair and white skin, wearing full-length black clothes and sitting in front of a mirror. She turns to her and says, “Three days, midnight.”
Anyway, later, the woman describes to her daughter that ever since she has encountered the white woman in the hotel, something bad has happened. It is the third day, and midnight is approaching. Just after midnight, the daughter hears screams from her mother’s room, and when she opens the door, she finds her dead body. Her skin is completely flayed, and it is a vicious sight to witness. Later, we see Raina, along with her sister Fey, come to the hotel as the hotel was inherited by their father, Djanuar, who used to be known as Baskara.
What happens after Raina encounters the White Woman?
Raina is told by Suktini and Garinto, her grandparents, that she will soon be the manager of the hotel once the paperwork is done. Fey has recently enrolled in a local school, and the sisters are settling in. Raina accidentally meets with her ex-boyfriend Ardo and brings him to the hotel. Ardo tells her that he is investigating the murder of the woman who used to be a staff member of the hotel. Raina is angry with her grandparents for not letting her know about this incident before their arrival.
Later, Raina faces the same situation as that woman whose skin was flayed. One night, she hears crying from the third floor, and she forgets that her grandmother told her not to go there because the renovation was going on. She opens the door to a room without a number. Raina comes across a ghostly figure: a white woman with white hair. She hears the same “Three days, midnight” from the woman. Later, she tells her grandmother about this, and she gives an expression as if she has seen some kind of ghost.
A couple of days later, Raina receives a phone call in the reception where a woman asks for a towel from a certain room. But, when Raina enters the room, she sees no one but the same white woman, and she comes out running from there. She collides with Ardo, and when he looks inside, there is nothing uncanny inside the room. Now, Raina confronts her grandparents about the real story of that room. They tell her that when they took over the hotel, a worker was the first to see the white woman, and the worker died after three days.
What does Raina decide to do to reverse the curse?
Raina has already realized the hotel’s curse, as her grandparents told her about the worker being dead in the most heinous way possible. So, Raina decides that they must tell Fey not to go into the room. Meanwhile, in the school, a monstrous creature chases Fey, and she somehow manages to escape from it. She comes back to the hotel and reveals that she has already seen the White Woman in that room, which caused the incident in the school.
Later, with Ardo, Raina decides to seek help from the priest her grandparents told her about. The priest tells them that since he does not know anything about the woman, he can not do much to help them. However, if Raina and Ardo somehow know the woman’s name, then he can try something to reverse the curse. Soon after, they find pieces of an old letter from different places inside the hotel. From that letter, Raina learns about the mention of a pine forest.
Ardo and Raina go to the pine forest and find a special kind of white flower that is different from the rest. Later, they find a man driving a boat. He brings them to the head of their village. When Ardo explains the reason they are here, the head seems very angry and hints at them that they should leave his house immediately. Since it is raining heavily outside, the boatman asks them to stay the night.
What is the White Woman’s Real Name?
Later that night, Ardo and Raina find the painting of the White Woman inside the village head’s home. His wife tells them that this is the picture of their daughter. The boatman knows the story all along. But since the village head might get angry, he keeps his mouth shut. So, when the village head is not at home, he speaks about the story of the White Woman. He says the name of the White Woman is Menoer since she looks as white as the white flower of the village named Menur.
Since she was different from the rest of the kids, she suffered a lot. Everyone bullied her, and her father, the village head, locked her inside the house because he thought of her as an embarrassment. So, one day, when Menoer turned 20, she just disappeared from the village. Ardo and Raina bring the priest in front of the room after knowing the name. The priest, with some skills, brings out the next part of Menoer’s story. He says that Baskara found Menoer inside the jungle.
Baskara brought her to the hotel, and since no rooms were ready back then apart from this one that is haunted now, he let her stay there. Baskara behaved so well with her that they became lovers in no time. Later, Basakara left for Jakarta and did not return to the hotel for a long time. Menoer went to Jakarta only to find Baskara with another woman who was carrying his child. Menoer returned to the hotel and flayed her skin for three days straight until she died inside the room.
The Haunted Hotel (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
How do Raina and Ardo reverse the Curse?
The priest shows them the way to reverse the curse. Soon, however, he is attacked by Menoer and dies on the spot. By now, Raina is so disappointed with her father for keeping everything secret that it is becoming a huge burden on her. She does not have much time left, nor does Fey, as the three days are almost over. Luckily, Fey finds old manuscripts of their father where a completely new side of the story is unveiled. There, they learn that Baskara’s visit to Jakarta was not at all about business. He went there to buy a wedding ring for Menoer.
But, on his way back, he met with an accident and lost all of his memory. The couple who took him in gave him the identity of Djanuar and married him to a woman. When he regained his memories, he came back to the hotel and found Menoer’s dead body. He buried the body at the back of the hotel, put a mark of the menu flower near the grave, and left the place embracing the identity of Djanuar forever. So, Baskara never really betrayed Menoer. It was all a big misunderstanding, as he regretted not letting Menoer know about his real intentions of visiting Jakarta.
So, now Raina has the ring, and she, along with Ardo, searches for the grave. They dig the wrong grave at first, and Ardo is possessed by Menoer’s ghost. Raina somehow manages to find the right grave and puts the ring on the finger of the skeleton. Finally, Menoer’s soul is released, and the sisters somehow manage to cheat death, almost on the verge of midnight on the third day. Everything is sorted now as Ardo has decided to marry Raina, knowing that she cannot be a mother.
Why was Ardo killed?
The following day, when Raina comes to visit Ardo, she finds him lying dead on the floor with his skin completely flayed. Raina does not understand why she and Fey remain unharmed, and Ardo is dead. Suddenly Fey tells her that Menoer knows Baskara never wronged her. So, she will not harm anyone related to him, including his daughters. But, since the world has tortured her in so many ways, she will remain in that room of the hotel and punish everyone who comes across her.
Fey also says that people who kill themselves are not allowed to go to the other side of the world. So, Menoer can never leave this world, and she will remain inside the hotel forever. Raina wonders how Fey knows so much about all of this. Suddenly, we see that Fey is possessed by Menoer, who thanks Baskara’s daughters for letting her know the truth. Her spirit was released but was not allowed to enter the eternity realm, so she came back where she belonged.
Later we see Raina close the hotel and put up a board for selling it. She leaves the hotel for good and probably goes back to Jakarta along with Fey and her grandparents. At the end of the film, we see two police officers entering the hotel, and they confront Menoer. She looks at them and says, “Three days, midnight.” Unbeknownst to them, the police officers now have only three days remaining of their lives.
