American Psycho | Consort Bar at the Omni King Edward — Panelling Built for Men Who Say Nothing

The King Edward opened in 1903 at 37 King Street East, designed by E.J. Lennox for the distiller George Gooderham, four hundred rooms and two million dollars of Edwardian confidence. It was the hotel where Toronto's money went to be seen agreeing with itself. Ninety-seven years later a film crew walked in and used it, almost unaltered, as the private-club world where Bateman and his colleagues drink and compare their lives in units of restaurant reservations.

The Consort Bar sits off the lobby on the ground floor and is the reason location guides keep sending people here: it has barely changed. Dark panelling, low lamps, deep chairs arranged so that conversation is possible but not required. It is a room designed for men to sit in and be unremarkable at each other, which is exactly the joke the film is making — everyone here is interchangeable, and everyone here has been mistaken for someone else at least once.

Upstairs the Crystal Ballroom on the top two floors was the most fashionable room in the city until fire regulations shut it in the late 1950s. It stayed dark for thirty-eight years and reopened in April 2017. The hotel has changed hands more often than Bateman changes business cards — Sheraton, Trusthouse Forte, Le Méridien, Starwood, and finally Omni, which bought it outright in 2015.

Order something at the Consort, sit facing the door, and watch how long it takes before two men in near-identical navy suits arrive and greet each other by the wrong name. The room has not stopped producing that scene.