The Royal Hotel (18)

Best friends Hanna and Liv run out of money in Sydney as they backpack around Australia. The cash-strapped 20-somethings seek temporary employment to pay for the rest of the trip and are dispatched to a remote mining town to work at The Royal Hotel run by Billy and on-off partner Carol. Hanna and Liv weather a barrage of sexist and racist patter from beer-chugging patrons. The young women bite their tongues, determined to enough money to move on by earning tips from locals.

LondonNet Film Review

The Royal Hotel (18) Film Review from LondonNet

Two backpackers experience a snapshot of life in the Australian Outback that doesn’t feature in any guidebook in a tense thriller directed by Kitty Green that lacks a killer final punch. The Royal Hotel is inspired by Pete Gleeson’s unsettling 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie about the brutal culture clash of two Finnish tourists working behind the bar of a Western Australian pub. The threat of violence that permeated that slice of life leaches into Green’s picture, co-written by Oscar Redding and shot on location in South Australia with a predominantly homegrown cast including Hugo Weaving, who donned Agent Smith’s menacing sunglasses across The Matrix franchise…

An unfashionably trim running time intensifies tension in early scenes. Discomfiting omens are plentiful (“Fresh Meat” scrawled in chalk above a pair of breasts on a pub billboard, rattlesnakes in glass jars behind the bar, a booze-sodden patron instructing new bartenders to flaunt their cleavage for tips) and storm clouds gather conveniently over a sun-scorched central location as harsh words translate into physical threats.

Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick are well-matched as travelling companions faced with a MeToo-era nightmare writ large. They play American best friends Hanna and Liv respectively, who run out of money in Sydney as they backpack around Australia. The cash-strapped 20-somethings playfully fib to one Norwegian tourist (Herbert Nordrum) about their country of origin, surmising that “everyone loves Canadians”, and reluctantly seek temporary employment to pay for the rest of the trip. “You are going to have to be OK with a little male attention,” breezily explains a recruiter, who dispatches them to a remote mining town to work at The Royal Hotel run by Billy (Hugo Weaving) and on-off partner Carol (Ursula Yovich).

Hanna and Liv replace fun-loving English girls Jules (Alex Malone) and Cassie (Kate Cheel) behind the bar and instantly weather a barrage of sexist and racist patter from beer-chugging patrons. The young women bite their tongues, determined to enough money to move on by earning tips from locals including Matty (Toby Wallace), Teeth (James Frecheville) and menacing Dolly (Daniel Henshall). Hanna scents the precariousness of their situation and is perpetually sour-faced but Liv plays along, ultimately making bad decisions that put the two friends in peril.

Opening with a drum’n’bass remix of Men At Work’s Down Under, The Royal Hotel teases more violence than manifests on screen but the threat is palpable, reflected in Garner’s tightly-coiled performance. Cinematographer Michael Latham, who collaborated with Green on previous films including The Assistant, captures stunning vistas when Hanna and Liv spend one afternoon swimming with a patron. Common sense goes walkabout in a frenetic closing 15 minutes that are determined to deliver Thelma & Louise-style defiance regardless of the narrative mess required to get there.

– Kim Hu