The Royal Hotel: Outback Setting Adds Dread to Gender Dynamics Thriller
By Liz Braun
Rating: B+
How women cope with men behaving badly is what you’ll see in The Royal Hotel, a new psychological thriller from Australian filmmaker Kitty Green (The Assistant).
The story concerns two young backpackers who take barmaid jobs in a remote mining area of the Australian outback.
Just as the strict religious sect in the Miriam Toews’ novel/Sarah Polley film Women Talking helps amplify issues around gender dynamics, so too the isolated setting of The Royal Hotel — a setting soaked in testosterone and alcohol — casts such issues in high relief.
There’s nothing here you haven’t witnessed before in the way of unpleasant male behaviour, which ranges in the movie from annoying to creepy to downright threatening. That godforsaken locale, however, really raises the stakes, and what’s somewhat ordinary often becomes terrifying. The atmosphere carefully built as the story unfolds is suffocating.
What the movie captures is how women deal on a daily basis with situations they must assess for the potential of real danger.
The Royal Hotel stars Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick as intrepid Canadian backpackers who find themselves out of money in Australia. They take the barmaid jobs in the outback to earn what they need to continue travelling but find they have signed on for far more than anticipated.
As Hanna, Garner plays the more timid of the two — she is very conscious of what’s around her and more alert to negative behaviour. Henwick’s character, Liv, is more laidback and less inclined to worry.
The dynamic between the two women helps keep an audience unsettled and adds to a pervasive sense of dread throughout.
When a bus drops the two women off near the spot where they’ll be working, a soaring overhead shot establishes that they are now a speck in the middle of nowhere.
The rundown Royal Hotel is operated by Billy (Hugo Weaving), an intimidating old souse who barks rules at Hanna and Liv and shows them the ropes of running his pub. Billy’s on-and-off girlfriend, Carol (Ursula Yovich), appears to be the one possible ally in the mix.
Hanna and Liv are taking over from two British women who are glimpsed as either dead drunk — Stockholm syndrome? — or sleeping it off in the filthy accommodations above the bar where the help lives. Is this what happens to women who find themselves out here in the back of beyond?
Soon enough, the two newbies have met the raucous pub regulars and taken their place behind the bar in the chaotic Royal Hotel.
Green is careful to make sure the various male characters the women encounter are all three dimensional — even the super-creepy Dolly (Daniel Henshall), with his rape-y vibe, is not a total villain; can the seemingly friendly Matty (Toby Wallace) be trusted? How the women react to increasingly dangerous, booze-fuelled events — a huge snake, a potential abduction, a man rebuffed — will keep you on the edge of your seat.
This is toxic masculinity seen from a feminist viewpoint; rest assured the women are not victims.
There’s nothing preposterous about The Royal Hotel (except maybe the ending.) At TIFF, where the movie had its Canadian premiere, director Green said her film is based on an Australian documentary called Hotel Coolgardie (2016), from filmmaker Pete Gleeson.
That film sees two female Finnish tourists take jobs at a bar in the outback, where they are undone by the sexist, racist, terrible behaviour of the men in the secluded mining area.
Truth is stranger than fiction, etc.
CLICK HERE to read Bonnie Laufer’s interview with The Royal Hotel writer/director Kitty Green.
The Royal Hotel. Directed by Kitty Green. Written by Kitty Green and Oscar Redding. Starring Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, Ursula Yovich, and Hugo Weaving. In theatres October 6.