Writer/director Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel slots into the “people having a terrible time in the Outback” groove but her follow-up to The Assistant is also its own distinctive beast.
It’s more Wake in Fright than Wolf Creek, with its subjects/victims being tested to their psychological limits rather than out-and-out monstered. It’s a “thriller” says the IMDb, and quite a few reviews say it is too. But it’s a funny sort of thriller, coming across more as a human drama with a lurking sense of threat unsettling enough almost for it to be counted as a horror movie.
But on to the plot. Two young women backpacking their way around the world wind up working at an out-of-the-way Aussie pub frequented by miners, roughnecks and horndogs. It’s the sort of place where everyone shouts, people drink till they’re blind drunk and hit on anything vaguely female, but there are a couple of rough diamonds in among the rednecks, alkies and desperadoes. The fact that this boozer is called The Royal Hotel is, of course, hugely ironic and a bit like the punchline to that joke The Aristocrats (about which there’s an entire documentary of the same name).
Green spends time with these people, building a picture of the location, the bar and the bar boss Billy (Hugo Weaving) and of course new bar girls Liv (Jessica Henwick) and Hanna (Julia Garner), plus regulars like Matty (Toby Wallace), Teeth (James Frecheville) and Dolly (Daniel Henshall), all of whom fancy a go on either Liv or Hanna.
Liv, to an extent, rolls with it. She’s travelling the world to see stuff she’s not familiar with, and she’s getting a salty dose of that in The Royal. Hanna, not so much. At one point she wants to go home, but Liv talks her out of it, not quite calling her a pussy but getting close.
Green spins these elements – booze, birds, blokes – through the permutations, playing heightened threat off against moments that are almost tender, with Hanna’s attitude to it all the real focus of what we’re watching. Is she right to be frightened of these dudes, or is she just a sheltered, slightly woke spoilsport who can’t take a joke or a bit of salty banter? She claims to be travelling for the experience then reacts badly every time she encounters something she’s not used to.
The Assistant looked at a man not unlike Harvey Weinstein from the point of view of his new female assistant (played by Garner) and made some suggestions going against the prevailing narrative. Something similar is going on in The Royal Hotel. Green’s political point of view is unusual here, and refreshingly so. Her sympathies seem to be with accepting Liv not unhappy Hanna. If The Royal Hotel set out to shake things up a bit, then it’s a case of job very much done.
The performances are cracking, and though Garner and Henwick are the focus of the film, it’s around the edges, where toxic masculinity – or just normal masculinity, depending on your point of view – lurks that the really good stuff is happening. Weaving is particularly good as the avuncular, stern, frequently shitfaced Billy, the Ocker bloke of myth. Henshall puts in another of his frighteningly psychopathic turns (if you’ve seen Snowtown, you’ll know what I mean), while Frecheville and Wallace duck this way and that as guys who might be pretty decent underneath all the sexual bluster.
Michael Latham, Green’s DP on every film she’s made and a fellow Australian, again does her proud, with visuals that alternate cosiness and menace. Composer Jed Palmer, another Green regular, reinforces Latham’s atmospherics with a score of windy howls, moans and grumbles.
Is it a thriller though? Is it really? It doesn’t ultimately matter, but for those wondering at the 50-minute mark where the actual thrills are, things do get slightly more gnarly in the last half hour or so. They become, in fact, very like 1971 cult fave Wake in Fright, but this time it’s two girls getting the Outback treatment, not a single bloke. They would make a great double bill.
The Royal Hotel – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
