The Royal Hotel
Directed by Kitty Green
Running time: 1hr31 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Jessica Henwick and Julia Garner in The Royal Hotel
Good, joyful, life-affirming things must happen all the time in the Australian Outback, but if they do, precious few have ever made it into the movies. To filmmakers, it’s a setting irresistibly severe in its beauty, all scorched horizontal lines expanding into infinity, only sporadically disrupted by stray, lonely signs of life — an ideal place for crazed serial killers or lost souls spiralling into madness. Kitty Green, the gifted Aussie docmaker who shifted chillingly into fiction with previous Film of the Week favourite The Assistant, doesn’t exactly change the record in her latest, The Royal Hotel. It’s a film where humanity gradually wilts in the desert heat, leaving only humans at their most base and desperate, their lives parched so dry as to be dangerously flammable.
But it’s also a film of wholly everyday horrors, a white-knuckle thriller where all its considerable suspense and dread spring from people behaving in horribly expected, bluntly gendered ways. The Assistant, a claustrophobic character study of a young female intern at a film production office plainly modelled on The Weinstein Company, tied our nerves into knots as the spectre of masculine predation suffused each scene. The Royal Hotel does something similar in very different environs: a shabby, lairy pub in a desolate Outback mining village, where the menfolk gather every night to let off steam after a hard day’s labour. For the young women manning the bar, however, that’s where their gruelling work begins.
It’s not a job anyone would want permanently: instead, pub landlord Billy (Hugo Weaving, heading up a veritable rogue’s gallery of Australian character actors at their least savoury) uses an agency to lure a succession of hapless foreign backpackers into doing it for as long as they can stand to. Pretty, skint young Canadians Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) are the latest recruits, arriving at the eponymous, flea-bitten premises hoping at least for kangaroo sightings and a swimming pool. They’re out of luck, and things get worse from there. Plucky, outgoing Liv tries to make the best of things — it’s an experience, right? And the guys at the pub aren’t so bad, are they? Rude and crude, sure, but it’s all just banter, isn’t it? Hanna, more coolly withdrawn in a way that doesn’t protect her from jockish taunts, isn’t so convinced.
Inspired by the 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie, Green and Oscar Redding’s script is an artful Rorschach test. How much terror and tension you find in it may depend on your own social biases and personal experiences — and, frankly, how much thought you give to the threat of male violence in your day-to-day existence. Green subtly volleys our sympathies between her two protagonists, so we alternately see Hanna through Liv’s exasperated gaze (“why won’t she just chill?”) and Liv through Hanna’s (“why won’t she just be careful?”). Meanwhile, certain eerily perceptive men in their orbit — notably Daniel Henshall’s deeply unnerving Dolly, his slumpy sadsack exterior masking very precise psychopathy — exploit the rift between them. Copious booze doesn’t help matters. Does it ever?
And yet, even as Green expertly tightens the screws toward a churning, volatile, don’t-forget-to-breathe climax, little in The Royal Hotel feels out of the ordinary — it’s a grandly expanded version of taut dramas you might see play out over many a Saturday night on the tiles, if you care to look. Many horror films hinge on the catharsis of relief, the safety of distance from the screen, the realisation that, as frightened as you were in the moment, none of that would ever happen to you. Green’s film, on the other hand, leaves you considering how many times you’ve lived it before, as victim, villain or bystander, and makes you shiver once more.
THE ROYAL HOTEL (2023) Written by Kitty Green and Oscar Redding | Shot by Michael Latham | Edited by Kasra Rassoulzadegan