The Royal Hotel is a bar, and if there were ever a point in its history in which its name was not intended to be ironic, ironic is very much how it reads by the time Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) show up to work there. It’s a battered joint in the Australian outback, a dive standing alone in a vast stretch of scrubland. The clientele at the Royal Hotel is almost entirely male, made up of workers at a nearby mining site the girls never see. They don’t get to see much beyond the immediate vicinity of the bar, which they live upstairs from. Hanna and Liv are Americans, backpackers who sign up for the job through a working holiday program after they run out of money while partying in Sydney — or, at least, Liv does, and Hanna would never abandon her friend. They’re effectively stuck at the Royal Hotel, and aside from the bus that only comes every few days, are able to venture out only when given a ride by one of the men. As the two soon learn, those favors come with strings attached. Hanna and Liv don’t just offer the novelty of new arrivals, they’re also some of the only options for female company available for miles, and there’s an unspoken assumption that they’ll be bestowing their favors on some of the competing customers.
The easiest way to describe The Royal Hotel is as a thriller, though its tension comes not from any particular villain, but from the increasingly precarious and booze-soaked situation — this is the kind of movie that gives you a secondhand hangover. The Royal Hotel was co-written and directed by Kitty Green, whose brilliant 2019 The Assistant, about a low-level employee at a production company whose tyrannical head has a lot in common with Harvey Weinstein, was the best and thorniest film to come out of Me Too, roiling with discomfort and complicity. This new feature reunites Green with The Assistant star Garner as well as with themes of being a woman in a world defined by male desire and violence. It’s a messier and less devastating work, but it’s nevertheless very effective. Green has a talent for depicting the way women constantly recalibrate their behavior when moving through male spaces, trying to figure out how to attract enough attention but not too much, to come across as pleasant without inviting unwanted intimacies. Every night at the bar becomes an exercise in trying to stave off chaos, as the men binge drink and try their luck with the new employees, some more ominously than others. The gruff owner Billy (Hugo Weaving) is just as likely to be getting trashed himself as he is to be running things, and either way, he makes it clear that banning troublemakers isn’t an option, especially when they’re paying customers.
A sickening anxiety hangs over these scenes, as well as the possibility of gang rape. But the film’s not all dread, which makes Hanna and Liv’s decision to stay more plausible. There are all sorts of mixed signals, and just enough promise of adventure (and a good story) to make the urge to leave early feel like it might be an overreaction. The pair overlap briefly with their predecessors, two hard-partying English girls who seemed to have a great time. Men who introduce themselves with off-color jokes, like young Matty (Toby Wallace, a standout in Babyteeth, once again excellent at being an off-putting dirtbag from some angles and a dreamboat from others), turn out to be great fun in the light of day. Then again, seemingly quiet ones like Dolly (Daniel Henshall) reveal themselves to be incredibly menacing. Carol (Ursula Yovich), Billy’s long-suffering cook, sometimes seems like an ally and other times seems like she has no patience for these Americans who’ve parachuted in for a stint of pulling pints and serving as eye candy. The realization that Hanna is much quicker to come to than Liv is that the structures of civilization they take for granted aren’t worth much when people refuse to abide by them, and that there are no adults in the room to take charge when things get out of hand.
The relationship between Hanna and Liv is the film’s grounding element as well as its biggest weakness. It’ll be painfully familiar to anyone who’s ever been cast as the Responsible Friend, cleaning up after a messier buddy, making sure they get to bed after drinking too much, loaning them money when they’re short. Garner, tight-faced and tense, is very good as Hanna, whose childhood with an alcoholic mother taught her lessons that the flirtatious, frequently drunk Liv has yet to learn. Henwick is less precise in her performance, her Liv naïve and frustrating but also tasked with making choices that feel dictated by the needs of the script rather than her character. Liv is the anchor holding Hanna in place when Hanna would clearly have cut and run earlier, and there’s so much to be explored in that kind of youthful, sealed-together attachment that The Royal Hotel only skirts around. The film instead opts for an image of solidarity that doesn’t really feel earned, one that doesn’t do justice to the complicated friendship at its core.
