‘The Royal Hotel’: Toronto Review

Dir: Kitty Green. Australia. 2023. 91mins

Seeking an adventure far from home, two female friends discover just how inhospitable the Australian Outback can be in The Royal Hotel, an unsettling psychological thriller in which the possibility of violence looms heavily over every frame. Filmmaker Kitty Green reunites with Julia Garner, the lead in her previous film The Assistant, to once again examine how women feel threatened in male spaces, centering the action at a rundown bar in the middle of nowhere which is frequented by coarse, lewd men who see in these young women (as one piece of graffiti bluntly puts it) fresh meat. Garner and co-star Jessica Henwick navigate the picture’s mixture of drama, suspense and horror superbly, leaving the audience fearful that this slow-burn powder keg will eventually go off — although we’re not sure who the casualties will be.

 A nerve-racking tale of toxic masculinity

After premiering at Telluride, The Royal Hotel screens in Toronto before heading to London. Neon will release the picture in the US on October 6, and strong reviews should greet this nerve-racking tale of toxic masculinity. 

Freewheeling Americans Hanna (Garner) and Liv (Henwick) spend their partying in Sydney on their holidays, but when Liv’s credit card is declined, they’re short of cash and decide on a whim to take a job at a remote pub in the Outback called The Royal Hotel, which is run by the uncouth, alcoholic Billy (Hugo Weaving). Working as bartenders serving drinks to the coarse clientele, who constantly sexually harass them, Hanna and Liv try to keep up a brave face. But Hanna begins to feel emotionally beaten down by the verbal torment, while her best friend takes a shine to charming bad boy Dolly (Daniel Henshall), who Hanna thinks might be an abuser.

In her 2017 documentary Casting JonBenet and the more recent The Assistant, Green has focused on the ways that women are preyed upon in society, and often left to fend for themselves. The Royal Hotel — which is inspired by the 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie, about two Finnish women working at a bar in Western Australia — creates a scenario that will draw comparisons to Wake In Fright as Hanna and Liv are subtly besieged by the unfiltered, unwelcome male attention they receive. Teaming up with her frequent cinematographer Michael Latham, Green makes the pub feel claustrophobic and dangerous, the camera constantly capturing the two leads behind the bar, a thin barrier that protects them from this horny mob, who bark at Hanna and Liv to smile more and hurry up with the beers.

Meanwhile, a more imperceptible friction begins to develop between the two friends. When we first meet them in Sydney, Hanna seems the more outgoing and flirty, but Garner creates a fascinating interiority to the character as her confidence slowly erodes around the pub’s rude patrons. At the same time, while it would be inaccurate to say that the more reserved Liv “finds herself” at The Royal Hotel, she seems less flustered by the environment, and Henwick illustrates Liv’s subtle personality shift. This puts her at odds with Hanna, who insists that they need to get out of there. Green and her actors offer hints that might explain why the friendship dynamic has shifted, but the clues are so intriguingly enigmatic that viewers may come away with different theories, each of them equally plausible.

The Royal Hotel slowly ratchets up the dread, with the first real escalation happening when a terrified Hanna realises late one night that Dolly has entered the apartment above the bar where the women live. Green shoots the sequence like a subdued zombie horror film, with Dolly the unholy living dead moving ever closer to their bedroom, and from that moment on, it’s understandable why Hanna doesn’t want Liv getting close to him. Liv’s insistence that Hanna is over-reacting only further drives a wedge between them, with Hanna eventually forced to do battle with both her friend and the patrons. 

As a study in nonstop microaggressions and gaslighting, The Royal Hotel gets under the skin, the two diminutive actresses dwarfed by the intimidating men towering around them. (As the permissive pub owner, Weaving is appropriately loathsome, the character’s sexism as pungent as his boozy breath.) The film’s tight tonal control wavers a bit in the final stretches, but Green externalises her characters’ inner anguish in a persuasive manner. They just wanted to escape from their regular lives, but all they found was a nightmare version of that same society.