For March, I’ve been concentrating on films directed by women, and now we round out the month with a film where I suspect that aspect matters very much.
Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel is movie of tension, uncertainty, and anticipatory dread; it’s about what it’s like to live in a world where Chekhov’s gun is always on the mantelpiece, where you watch, your stomach in knots, as men walk by it and caress the trigger. Pick it up, playfully point it in your direction. Are they joking? If you laugh, does that make it a joke? What happens if you can’t play along?
Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) are backpacking through Australia, whiling away their days with flirtations, cruises, and drinks–until their money runs out. To rack up some quick cash, they take jobs at The Royal Hotel, a mining town bar in the beautiful, sun-drenched middle of nowhere. There’s no wifi, no cell signal. The bus only comes every few days. I can’t help thinking of that excellent, funny-chilling speech in The Haunting: “So there won’t be anyone around if you need help.” Add in the boisterous, hard-drinking miners, and you can throw in an Always Sunny quote for seasoning: “And, you know, they can’t refuse … because of the implication.”
One of the reasons The Royal Hotel is so unnerving is that how rarely that implication crystallizes into an explicit threat–and how hard it is to know or explain when that’s happened. Green, Garner, and Henwick also make some of the deftest use of unstated, barely-alluded-to backstory that I’ve seen. We know that Liv is in Australia because “it was the farthest away,” and there’s a stiffness to that revelation that speaks volumes; we know that Hanna’s mom drank “enough” for her to be cautious, but we don’t know how much that colors her small-voiced attempts at de-escalation and self-protection when things get bad. She’s more attuned to potential danger than Liv is–sometimes literally more awake to it–but that may not be enough. We may believe her, but Liv may not, at least not always.
The most obviously unsettling presence at The Royal Hotel is Dolly (Daniel Henshall), who, right from the start, stares a little too long. (Towards the end, a viscerally skin-crawling–but, again, plausibly deniable–phone call makes you feel like Hanna and Liv are lucky to remain in psychological thriller country: Dolly brings the potential for much, much darker horror.) But even temporary allies among the patrons can’t be entirely trusted. Hanna forgives affable Matty (Toby Wallace) for his initial frat-bro “jokey” sexual harassment, and aww, he’s sweet! He sings along with Kylie Minogue! He’s fun to hang out with! What a nice holiday romance for Hanna! … Until Matty oh-so-casually redirects an Indigenous Australian delivery man from actually stepping foot into the bar, that is. Until he throws a violent tantrum at Hanna turning down sex. Maybe quiet, respected, shyly sweet Teeth (James Frecheville) would be a better bet, and he’s who they should depend on. Then again, maybe not. In the middle of nowhere, trust is a high-stakes proposition.
The Royal Hotel doesn’t quite stick its landing, and the note of fuck-you empowerment it reaches for unfortunately feels more forced and less convincing than all its exquisitely convincing disempowerment. I don’t want it to turn into Wolf Creek, but as it stands, its (relatively) optimistic ending feels vaguely dishonest to me. I want to believe in it, but I don’t.
But that feels like the only noteworthy flaw. For much of its runtime, The Royal Hotel is a masterpiece at conveying how terrifying it can be to be a woman in the company of a lot of strange, drunk men, especially out in the middle of nowhere, and it manages to explore that feeling effectively, intelligently, and from every possible angle, ably turning an observation into a top-notch film. The cast is fantastic, even down to the smallest roles, and the landscape and cinematography are likewise exceptional. It’s worth watching, and if you see it, you should come try to argue me into liking the ending more. I want to believe.
The Royal Hotel is streaming on Hulu.