Reframing Australian cinema’s long tradition of Outback Horror through a more contemporary feminist lens, The Royal Hotel is a gripping and polished thriller that casts a caustic eye on toxic masculinity. Chronicling the struggles of two young Canadian women battling booze-soaked Neanderthal sexism and casual racism in a hellish Australian backwater town, this is a story grounded in everyday reality, but shot with some of the same heightened visual swagger as blood-splattered Oz-pulp cult classics like Wake in Fright (1971) and Wolf Creek (2005).
Launched in Telluride and Toronto to general acclaim, The Royal Hotel screens in competition in San Sebastian this week. Though it wavers uneasily between subtle art-house observations and crowd-pleasing thriller tropes at times, Green’s second dramatic feature is mostly compelling and engaging. A strong cast, timely themes, stunning landscapes and fan-friendly genre elements could translate into healthy box office numbers when it opens next month.
Launching her career with acclaimed documentaries like Ukraine is Not a Brothel (2013) and Casting JonBenet (2017), Green then moved into fictional drama with The Assistant (2019), a scathing depiction of film-industry misogyny released just as the #MeToo movement erupted. On some level, The Royal Hotel is a spiritual sequel to The Assistant, reuniting Green with star Julia Garner for another forensic critique of the male gaze and patriarchal power abuse.
Both films also draw heavily on real people and real events. Indeed, The Royal Hotel is actually a fictionalised remake of director Pete Gleeson’s observational documentary Hotel Coolgardie (2016), which charted the bruising expeirneces of two young Finnish women working in a small-town bar in Western Australia. The names and nationalities have been changed here, and the underlying mood of creeping dread amplified, but only slightly.
Green sets up The Royal Hotel with impressively brisk, agile strokes. In the middle of a superbly filmed floating techno party on a cruise boat in Sydney harbour, Canadian twentysomething backpackers Hanna (Garner) and Liv (British Games of Thrones and Iron Fist co-star Jessica Henwick) suddenly discover they are broke. Faced with either cutting short their Australian vacation or working for a few weeks, they agree to take temporary bartender jobs at a rowdy pub in a remote Outback mining town. With ominous understatement, the employment agent in Sydney warns them they will need to be “comfortable with a little male attention.”
Bearing the ironically grandiose title The Royal Hotel, this far-flung oasis turns out to be a ramshackle saloon run by boorish alcoholic Billy (a muscular, committed turn from Aussie screen icon Hugo Weaving) and his long-suffering partner Carol (Ursula Yovich). The arrival of two pretty young women in an ultra-macho backwater instantly causes ripples of sexual tension among the bar’s heavily male clientele, who bombard the “fresh meat” with suggestive jokes, indecent proposals and persistently creepy attention. When they protest, Hanna and Liv are derided as uptight outsiders who fail to appreciate harmless Aussie locker-room humour. The Donald Trump defence, in other words.
Hanna and Liv slowly learn to navigate this oppressive social terrain, forming an uneasy bond with handsome bad boy Matty (Toby Wallace) and dim but well-meaning Teeth (James Frecheville). But some of the bar’s other regulars, notably brooding Dolly (Daniel Henshall), cross the line into menacing, abusive behaviour. Green smartly deconstructs the prickly power balance here between predatory men and female prey, the steady micro-aggressions and veiled threats that lie behind so much routine male entitlement. In an extra turn of the screw, a rift opens up late in the film between Hanna and Liv that puts both of them at greater risk.
Throughout The Royal Hotel, Green toys with Outback Horror tropes, hinting at sexualised violence and other monstrous misdeeds to come, only to smartly unpack these cliches by focussing more on the everyday horrors of misogyny, compounded by a nihilistic culture of chronic alcoholism. After sustaining this commendable tonal control for over an hour, the film’s final descent into apocalyptic chaos feels like a cop-out, pandering to genre conventions rather than subverting them.
Characters who were once plausibly cautious suddenly become illogically reckless, ambiguous allies become bestial gargoyles, and a story that began with nuanced social critique ends with broad sledgehammer strokes. While there is a certain pleasing catharsis in seeing Liz and Hanna slay the patriarchal dragon, it feels like a conveniently neat closure is being imposed on a writhing snakepit unresolved issues. Sure, you can check out of Hotel Toxic Masculinity any time you like, but you can never really leave.
Whatever its arguable shortcomings in narrative logic, The Royal Hotel is a high-calibre package overall, and Green clearly a skilled film-maker. Garner fills her scenes with riveting low-voltage tension, Henwick radiates a dangerously innocent charm, and the male support cast all do fine work with mostly mono-dimensional roles. Michael Latham’s cinematography drinks in the full sun-bronzed alien majesty of the ruggedly beautiful South Australian locations while the witty soundtrack has fun with some veteran Aussie music icons, from the sly techno remix of Men at Work’s 1981 hit “Land Down Under” that opens the film to the recurring use of pop diva Kylie Minogue as a semi-ironic motif.
Director: Kitty Green
Screenwriters: Kitty Green, Oscar Redding
Cast: Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, Hugo Weaving, Ursula Yovich, Bree Bain, Toby Wallace, Daniel Henshall, James Frecheville, Herbert Nordrum
Producers: Iain Canning, Kath Shelper, Emile Sherman, Liz Watts
Cinematography: Michael Latham
Editing: Kasra Rassoulzadegan
Music: Jed Palmer
Production companies: See-Saw Films (UK), Scarlett Pictures (Australia)
World sales: HanWay Films (UK)
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (official selection)
In English
90 minutes
