Herb Hsu’s colourful debut assembles a cast of characters who have slightly damaged pasts and inhabit former hostess dancer Mangs’ crumbling hotel. Tsai Ming Liang regular Lu Yi-Ching plays the ageing Mang who too has a past she can’t run from, and rents rooms to an assortment of characters:

Teenage runaway Chow Chow wears her school uniform all day long, and her only friend is her cuddly toy rabbit.

Broke but proud unemployed Japanese salaryman, Asano, is unable to tell his wife back in Japan that he has been laid off.

The hotel cleaner, a Vietnamese immigrant, is saving to build a house back home.

Yeh Ling Long, a prostitute, operates from one of the rented rooms in which she lives with her son.

Nobody knows why these guests stay at Hotel Black Cat and never go home.

Mangs history is then slowly revealed with the appearance of Danny, a man from her past, recently released from jail.