REVIEW: The Royal Hotel is nail-biting tension through and through
Posted October 6, 2023 5:12 am.
Picture this, you’re travelling through the Australian outback and you find yourself with no money. You take a job at a bar in a mining town in the middle of nowhere to survive, and you realize that you’re the only young woman in this town. Almost everyone else is a man surrounded by testosterone, and every time they see you they’re getting drunk and looking at you like you are prey.
Toby Wallace, Hugo Weaving, and Jessica Henwick in the Royal Hotel courtesy of Elevation Pictures.
That’s the situation the two lead characters of the Royal Hotel find themselves in. Hanna (played by Julia Garner from Ozark and the Assistant) and Liv (played by Jessica Henwick from Glass Onion and Iron Fist) take a job at a small pub called the Royal Hotel to make some money and find themselves becoming the obsession of several men in their town. As the days go by, the two main characters find the pressure building and the walls closing in on them.
Directed by Australian filmmaker Kitty Green (the director of the Assistant and Casting JonBenet), this film deliberately plays with a lot of genre tropes. Form the horror of the situation to the tense thriller designs of the setting, this film trades in fear and tension. It’s a very intense movie, one that will that keep the viewer on the edge of their seat the entire time. These power struggles between men and women are a theme that Green has dealt with before in her films, most notably the the corporate #MeToo drama the Assistant.
I sat down with Green who tells me that part of why the connection between the Royal Hotel and the former works are because of the acting talent of Julia Garner. In both films she plays a character who focuses on her setting, noticing the inherent power dynamics of it very closely, something Green is very familiar with due to her previous work in documentaries. “Julia’s character in both movies…is kind of analyzing her environment in that documentary way, observing people and their behaviour.”
Julia Garner in the Royal Hotel, courtesy of Elevation Pictures.
This intense focus leans into the genre aspect of the film, especially as the men surrounding them become more drunk with both alcohol and power. Green tells me that she looked into a lot of genre elements including Westerns, horror and even comedy in making this film to create a conflicting collage to represent the character’s state of mind.
But more importantly “it’s also trying to subvert this general kind of horror genre thing which is that generally the girls with backpacks on in the middle of nowhere are gonna die.” Throughout the film the main characters are constantly pushing back against the situation they’re presented with. They have no intention of being the horror victims of slasher films, they are people making their way and surviving as best they can.
The Royal Hotel is a nail-biting film, one that a lot of viewers could struggle to watch. But as much as it is intense, it’s equally cathartic. This film gets a 3/5, you can watch it in cinemas now.
