It’s clear from the outset of The Royal Hotel, the latest disquieting expose of toxic masculinity from director Kitty Green, roughly where things are heading.
Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) are two free-spirited backpackers whose Australian adventure is cut short when they run out of money (they identify as Canadian, but may actually be American; as Liv cheerfully points out, “Everybody loves Canadians!”). The employment office has exactly one opening: The Royal Hotel, a remote saloon deep in the Outback. The bar primarily serves miners, and the agent pointedly warns them they’ll need to be comfortable with “male attention.” Hanna, understandably, is hesitant, but free-spirited Liv sees this as just another chapter in their wild vacation story; “Will there be kangaroos?” she asks with a hopeful smirk that suggests that none of this is 100% “real” to her.
Reality sets in, of course, when they find themselves behind the bar, which is even more dilapidated and horrifying than the phrase “remote Outback saloon” would suggest. Their living quarters (above the bar) are squalid, with showers that only occasionally work. The boss, Billy (Hugo Weaving), is a fall-down drunk, and the words he does manage to slur out are not particularly pleasant or encouraging. The bar itself essentially serves as a fishbowl, placing these fresh-faced city girls on display for dozens of slavering Aussie wildmen (the girls’ first order is for a “Dickens Cider,” which they repeat out loud two or three times before getting the “joke”). The question, of course, is not if the situation will erupt into violence, but rather who will be the perpetrator: the fratty young man who insists on driving the girls to an even-more-remote swimming hole? The seemingly charismatic gent given to flying off the handle if his smiles are not returned? The venomous snakes which occasionally slither across the barroom floor? The quiet, scar-faced bloke known only to the locals as “Teeth?”
The answer, of course, is “all of the above” to one degree or another, but the answer is also largely moot. Though all the ingredients are here for a wild-and-wooly Ozploitation revenge thriller, Green has little interest in making I Spit on Your Grave, or even Straw Dogs (Straw Dingos?). The violence, when it comes, is not the cataclysm we’re trained to expect, nor is it really the point. Rather, the build-up is the violence. What’s so chilling about The Royal Hotel is that most of the behavior on display is stuff that you’ve probably witnessed or experienced in the wild, from the casual microaggressions (“Would it kill you to smile a little?”) to the belligerent drunk roping uncomfortable strangers into his tirade. The horror is in seeing our protagonists dropped into a world in which these are the only possible interactions; individually, one might be able to tune them out and rise above, but here they are amplified in noise and volume to an impossible degree. They are asked to grin and bear the unbearable.
The audience surrogate here is Hanna, played with brittle expressiveness by Garner. Hanna reacts as we imagine we’d react; her defenses are up from the moment she gets off the bus, and her attempts to maintain a tough facade in the face of an increasingly malevolent male gaze are devastatingly relatable. Liv, on the other hand, is a little tougher to pin down. Clearly painted as the more irresponsible of the two from the start (it’s her drink order that finally breaks the bank), Liv takes a decidedly laissez faire approach to the situation. She shrugs off Billy’s liberal use of the C-word as “a cultural thing,” and even at times seems to invite the advances of the patrons, yet largely seems no less intelligent than Hanna (casting Henwick, one of the most charismatic young actresses working today, is an inspired choice; we want to believe against all rationality that she knows what she’s doing). This is a character we’re not accustomed to seeing in this sort of movie, because she complicates the narrative we’re trained to expect. But her seeming complicity– her desire to find normalcy in the plainly horrible– is crucial in understanding these all too recognizable cycles of violence.
This is, of course, familiar territory for Green, who here firmly establishes herself as one of our shrewdest cinematic chroniclers of rape culture. Her feature debut, 2019’s The Assistant (also starring Garner), details the callous bureaucracy shielding an unnamed Hollywood mogul clearly modeled after Harvey Weinstein, while her documentaries Ukraine Is Not a Brothel and Casting JonBenet examine the links between institutionalized sexism and violence. The characterizations of the men in this film (including a hard-partying Norwegian played by The Worst Person in the World’s Herbert Nordrum) are both ruthlessly satirical and appallingly recognizable, and the women’s reactions are keenly observed and felt. Her films neither pull punches nor concede to cheap thrills; it is clear from even a casual watch that she means it.
Is The Royal Hotel a “horror movie?” Not in any conventional sense, unless you feel like utterly ruining the vibe of your Halloween party. But it is as horrifying as any film released this year: in the behavior of its characters, in the inescapability of its situation, and, most of all, in how recognizable it all is even in more “civilized” corners of the world. It’s tempting to call this film “timely,” but that isn’t quite right either; this has all been going on for centuries (and it often feels like the Royal Hotel itself is stuck a few centuries back). What it is is a vital piece of filmmaking from one of our most vital current filmmakers, a deliberately uncomfortable watch, yet dynamic enough never to feel like a chore. There are Royal Hotels all over the world, and you’ll find its patrons in far more respectable establishments.
The Royal Hotel
2023
dir. Kitty Green
91 min.
Opens Friday, 10/6 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
