Neither of Kitty Green’s first two narrative features are particularly violent but both are primed with the threat of it. The haunting menace of angry, entitled men is the dangerous weapon swinging precariously above the heads of the protagonists in each film. 2020’s The Assistant was a brilliant, contained drama where Julia Garner worked at a New York film production office and laid witness to the abuse of power run rampant. In Garner’s latest collaboration with Green, The Royal Hotel, similar themes are broached, even if the setting is on the other side of the world. Set deep in the Australian Outback, Garner stars alongside Jessica Henwick. They play two backpackers traveling the world and desperate for cash. Like The Assistant, power dynamics fuel the suspense, as this unruly world of men descends on the two young women.
This all sounds very pat, as if Green is mooching off of popular anti-male rhetoric or only presenting her female characters as helpless victims. Green is a smarter storyteller than that. The script, written by Green and Oscar Redding, resides in between chilling thriller and atmospheric drama, absorbing both the beauty and the bleakness of the setting in equal measure. The film is an adaptation of the 2016 documentary, Hotel Coolgardie, which followed two Finnish tourists who get a rude awakening when they choose to work at a bar in an isolated Australian mining town. Hanna (Garner) and Liv (Henwick) aren’t Finnish. When the film opens, they are partying on a boat in Sydney. When a man approaches them asking where they’re from, Liv says they’re Canadian. Why? Everyone likes Canadians.
We get the impression that their lives are raucous but not out of control. There are minor allusions to the past, where their travels are presented less as recreation, and more as escape. When Liv informs Hanna that they’re almost out of cash, they decide to visit the office of their work-while-travel program. There’s only one opportunity available: work and maintain a bar deep in the Outback. A warning is provided: the bar is in an isolated mining town, which means there will be a lot of male attention. To get there, they take a bus which drops them off at an abandoned intersection. They’re then picked up by Carol (Ursula Yovich), who drives them to the hotel. She’s sparse and irritated, drops them off and gives them instructions to get to their rooms, doesn’t even follow them inside.
The bar is run by Billy (Hugo Weaving), a cantankerous, bearded man who calls Hanna a cunt within a minute of meeting her. Hanna and Liv are there to replace two English women (Alex Malone, Kate Cheel) who they find sprawled across the couch, passed out. That night, the unruly locals go overboard giving their friendly English bar maids a proper sendoff. The experience – chaotic, hedonistic, teetering on the edge of dangerous – is enough to convince Hanna that she wants to turn around and go back to Sydney. Liv convinces her friend to stay – they wanted escape, and they’re getting it. Some of the men are nicer than others. Teeth (James Frecheville) is quiet and sensitive compared to his peers, while the young, persistent Matty (Toby Wallace) feels like less of a threat. Then there’s Dolly (Daniel Henshall), the brooding regular whose intense, predatory gaze punctures Hanna from the first moment she sees him.
Things go predictably South. There’s much insistence from the locals that Hanna and Liv could smile more, be more responsive to their unclever innuendo, less hostile to their unbridled masculinity. If their predecessors were any example, Hanna and Liv’s actual job is to entertain these pent-up men in whatever way possible, whether it be drinking with the same level of abandon or providing sexual favors. It becomes clear that these men have certain expectations from this way station for traveling women. Billy, the supposed authority, provides no protection, and in fact is upset with their unwillingness to play the game. His scabrous mood and persistent drunkenness means they have no one to count on but themselves. Tension builds as the wolves creep closer, and the girls’ dream of exploring the Outback quickly turns into a nightmare.
Where The Assistant was a mostly brooding film – its rage a persistent seethe for 87 excruciating minutes – The Royal Hotel is more expansive, its anger more pronounced. This is a local story for the Australian Green, but this is a tale that could conceivably take place anywhere. Setting it in the Outback gives Green the chance to contrast the locale’s remote tranquility with its unforgiving listlessness. These men are in some way the product of their lack of supervision, Lord of the Flies leveled up into adulthood. The few women who live there are calloused by the brutality (the one exception is a character named Glenda, played brilliantly by Barbara Lowing, who is an active participant in the town’s misbehavior), and the rotation of visiting bar workers often don’t realize that they themselves are being served up to this festering crowd until it’s too late.
The tandem of Green and Julia Garner appears to be a rather fruitful one. The actress, known mostly for winning several Emmys for Ozark, fits perfectly within Green’s menacing worlds. Her performance, a constant balance between steely defiance and disoriented vulnerability, is the tone-setter for this genuinely unsettling story. Green’s direction is clever. What at first feels like a subjective point-of-view (Hanna’s fear of the readily-apparent threats is contradicted by nearly everyone, even Liv), is revealed to objective after all. This filmmaking choice hinges on Garner’s ability to play the arc from continually gaslit to perspectively vindicated. In both this and The Assistant, Garner is able to do so without overblown theatricality. When Hanna finally does let off some steam, it’s a tension that’s been bubbling over a very long time.
Kitty Green’s commentary on her home country – in no uncertain terms, she details how these men are also very racist toward the indigenous population of the area – is scathing, even if her concerns seem more macro. If there’s a fault to be found, it’s that Henwick – an exciting young actor who’s shown great range in such varied performances as The Matrix Resurrections and Glass Onion – seems to be sacrificed to the film’s tight 91 minutes. Liv’s obliviousness to everything Hanna foresees feels too unrealistic, especially since the script is so foreboding. Green’s origin as a true crime documentarian has some residual effect on her aesthetic, but she is proving to be phenomenally astute storyteller. She’s well-versed in the inherent dangers that confront women throughout the world, and The Royal Hotel is another narrative exploring that.
Directed by Kitty Green