The Unwanted
Synopsis
When socially isolated janitor Erik Engwald accepts a solitary job at the remote Dalen Hotel in the Norwegian mountains, he sees it as a perfect escape from a world that never wanted him. After being laid off from the hospital where he worked for six years, he perceives the offer of a seven-month winter position—where he will be the sole caretaker of the closed hotel—as a godsend.
Together with his only friends, the dogs Rex and Nova, Erik arrives at the majestic but desolate hotel. The massive wooden structure with its long corridors and dim spaces quickly becomes a mirror for Erik's own psyche. As the winter isolation deepens, the boundary between reality and nightmare begins to blur.
Through fragmentary flashbacks, Erik's painful past is revealed—a Polish child, adopted to Sweden, who involuntarily ended up with his emotionally cold grandmother after his father's suicide and his mother's emotional collapse. In his grandmother's cold basement, his identity was shaped by abandonment and emotional isolation. Each evening, he was forced to undergo a ritualistic cold bath meant to "cleanse" him, a trauma that remains deeply embedded in his adult self.
As the Norwegian winter intensifies, Erik's psychological descent deepens as well. He begins to experience hallucinations, hears voices, and feels the hotel communicating with him. The isolation and darkness bring out his worst impulses, and in a confused state, he locks his faithful dogs in the boiler room for several days—an unconscious reenactment of his own childhood trauma.
In a desperate act of self-annihilation, Erik lies down in the snow outside the hotel, ready to let the cold take him. But in this moment of self-destruction, he encounters his younger self—a manifestation of the little boy he once was. In this confrontation, Erik reaches a turning point where he realizes he must love the abandoned boy he once was in order to survive.
"The Unwanted" is a psychologically profound story about trauma, loneliness, and the ghosts we carry within us. It is a dark but ultimately hopeful exploration of how we are defined by our memories, and how reconciliation with the past is sometimes the most difficult but only way forward.