Retrospective Film Review

Mystery Train (1989) • 35 Years Later — offbeat comedy and a magical aura in a classic indie anthology

Three stories connected by a Memphis hotel and the spirit of Elvis Presley.

An old, rundown hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. Elvis Presley’s “Blue Moon” plays on radios on pitch-black nights, with the low, constant hum of cicadas providing a chorus. And in the early hours of the morning, a gunshot rings out, obliterating the silence of this dilapidated hotel in a sleepy neighbourhood.

This song and that bullet also connect seven people: though they’ll never know it, separated by the thin walls of that Memphis flophouse, fate brought them all under the same roof for one night of singular strangeness. And the very next morning, it will lead them down different paths again.

Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train is one of his many great anthology films, all of which have both amusing and enigmatic qualities to them. Be it Night on Earth (1991), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), or this forgotten indie classic, Jarmusch’s keen interest in the meandering…