Review: The Royal Hotel

Director: Kitty Green

Stars: Jessica Henwick, Julia Garner, Daniel Henshall

Slightly unassuming thanks to its fairly generic title, Kitty Green’s blistering follow-up to her critically acclaimed narrative feature debut The Assistant delves into the Australian outback to present a culture clash within the walls of a grotty backwater pub. American travellers Hannah (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) are partying their way across the country on the way to Bondi beach when they run out of funds. In a contrivance that feels worthy of a horror movie, a Sydney job centre has only the one option for them; bar work in an ultra-remote mining community. With little choice, the young women accept the assignment. After all, there might be kangaroos. Furthering this sense of set-up, the pair are immediately locked inside the pub the minute they arrive.

The Royal Hotel – as this moribund venue is monikered – is a rundown watering hole that cycles through just such gigging bar staff, and Hannah and Liv nominally overlap with the outgoing Brits, who seem to have acclimatised themselves totally to the culture of binge-drinking and bawdy banter that typifies the working hours. By virtue of its very locale, The Royal Hotel is a more raucous proposition than the stiflingly pared-down office spaces of The Assistant, but Green is just as keen to itemise a rampant hive of gendered hostility, here manifesting in the misogynistic aggressions against bartending females. The looks, the jokes, the come-ons.

Liv takes it all in her stride, adapting to the regressive tics of rural Australian life. Hannah is more entrenched in her Gen Z abhorrence of these behaviours. Steadily, a rift grows between them, though Hannah remains steadfast in her protection of Liv, especially whenever her friend lapses into the boozy revelries that the menfolk perpetuate.

There’s precious little comfort from landlord Billy (Hugo Weaving), an alcoholic with escalating debts and a gruff, no-nonsense mentality that befits The Royal Hotel. Though hardly a dependable back-up, his presence on site seems to maintain a tacit status quo. Whenever he’s away, the pervasive threat from the miners on Hannah and Liv is palpably intensified, and Hannah increasingly sees a mounting danger in the cold, hunter-like eyes of Dolly (Daniel Henshell). Elsewhere, Matty (Toby Wallace) is the nearest in age to the two and sporadically offers the potential for a casual romantic dalliance for Hannah, while the curiously nicknamed ‘Teeth’ (James Frecheville) might prove to be a brick shithouse of gallantry, though his possessive claim on Liv disavows any sense of ‘safety’ he might otherwise exude.

The nights are hectic, and The Royal Hotel taps into that sense of unquenchable thirst conjured in Australian psychological horror staple Wake In Fright – a genre giant that Green’s film feels intrinsically connected to. As things progress and the potential for violence seems all the more likely, her film similarly connects to the town/country class tensions found in Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. The possibility of similarly horrific sexual violence always exists in The Royal Hotel. As with The Assistant, Green is keen enough to know that she doesn’t necessarily need to weaponise it for it to remain persistently effective.

Aware that her set-up is more overtly hostile than her last feature, Green leans into genre inference on a number of occasions. Hannah is startled by Dolly in the hallway outside their shared room, and his lumbering drunkenness in the dark seems positively zombielike. Later, having locked the locals out for their own safety, their silhouettes clamour at the frosted windows like ghouls, evoking the finale of Shaun of the Dead or the haunted locals of Messiah of Evil. For 80 minutes Hannah’s frustration builds and builds, until a guttural scream prefigures the only fitting way this can end. If Green’s keenness for horror iconography needed further clarification, Garner spends much of the third act of the movie wielding an axe.

“We were supposed to be getting away from everything,” Liv despairs at one point, but one wonders what it is she means, exactly. Is it the pervasive misogyny of home? Her following accusation to Hannah – “You’re the embarrassment” – muddies those waters and suggests maybe she’s fleeing the all-consuming reaction against it. Social media has had a profound effect on the ways in which young people respond to engrained behaviours that have existed for generations. The expectation, now, is a sea change of progression. We want better immediately. Such change is long overdue, but the impatience for it creates many of the tensions that unspool in The Royal Hotel, particularly for Hannah. This venue is behind the times – or outside of them – and much of Hannah’s rage stems from the stubborn refusal to kowtow to her modernist sensibility.

Via The Royal Hotel, Green examines the combustibility of this point in time, when the need for change abuts more conservative – or downright troglodyte – mindsets. Her smouldering final images confirm what the rest of her movie asserts; that the past has run out of time, and maybe the only way to start anew is through raising outmoded concepts to the ground.

It may not be as insidiously subtle as her last effort, but the gritty, grubby genre elements that fleck The Royal Hotel are more instantly appealing. With all performers (and especially Garner) on top form, this exasperated feminist battle cry manages to be both effectively oppressive and riotously cathartic. I bloody loved it.