Written by: Kitty Green & Oscar Redding
Starring: Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, Toby Wallace, Hugo Weaving
Rating: [3/5]
Living out the youthful backpacker lifestyle when not wealthy puts travelers in a place where they need to ensure they can budget for the experience they seek. When the funds run out, then more needs to be generated, which may involve jobs that one might not want to do but must be done to keep the gravy train going. The Royal Hotel presents a circumstance demonstrating just that, and it makes for quite the tense affair as we continue to yell at our characters to run for their lives before it’s too late.
Spending some time travelling Australia, Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) run out of money and go through an employment agency to pick up some odd jobs to keep them afloat. The only opportunity presented to them consists of going to an outback mining town and working as bartenders at a decrepit hotel. Given the lack of options they take it and realize the owners and patrons of this establishment make them quite uncomfortable.
One could feasibly say, the central thesis of The Royal Hotel begins and ends with the idea of men being quite terrible to women. From the brazenly misogynist ones to the nice guys, men can truly be awful to women, especially the young ones. Younger women like Hanna and Liv allow the combination of misogyny and sexual attraction that puts them in harm’s way if they continually do not oblige to the whims of these insecure men. This film relishes in placing these two women in such uncomfortable situations, and it very much fits what director Kitty Green has an interest in presenting so early in her career.
Coming off The Assistant also starring Julia Garner, Green has demonstrated her desire to create oppressingly uncomfortable circumstances for her protagonists whether they work as an assistant for Harvey Weinstein or in the case of The Royal Hotel having to be ogled and demeaned by men at this bar. Every scene with them serving these men will make your skin crawl and infuriate on the audacity of these men and how they believe they can interact with a woman simply because they are a patron of the establishment. It stems from this entitlement they feel to have to the attention of these two young women, where they have no issue asking for them to present a smile or flirt back to them as part of their job. Green understands this ideal but also does not leave the nice guys off of the hook either in the way they also perpetuate these issues, which makes the larger points.
For the majority of this film’s runtime, you just feel terrified for what will eventually happen to these girls if one of these men decide to get physical in what they demand from them. Considering they find themselves in this very isolated location with miles and miles to go for any real help, it makes the prospect of something bad happening to them much more likely, and Green continually ratchets up this tension to an unbearably degree.
However, as great of a job she does in building the tension, the film does struggle in landing the plane in a way that brings any sense of satisfaction. When Green utilizes this approach in The Assistant, it makes sense because it matches the subtlety and detachment the rest of the film employs. It remains wholly consistent. With the way this film sets up these characters and the circumstance in such a blunt manner, the way it all culminates in the end could only muster a mere shrug because of the jumps it makes and ultimately how it concludes, which I can only talk so much about without spoiling it. The third act mostly needed something a bit more substantive with what the film provided in the previous two, which deflates it right at the end when it had the potential to be something much greater.
Even with the glaring flaws it carries, Kitty Green proves once again she knows how to build tension with her storytelling in the way she makes her characters and the audience uncomfortable in these terrifying circumstances. It makes me look forward but remain afraid of what she will do next, but The Royal Hotel still has so much to appreciate from the good performances by Garner and Henwick as well as a surprise sighting of the great Hugo Weaving portraying a character I have never seen him try to take on before.
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