The Royal Hotel: a backpacking trip to the Outback takes a chilling, gripping turn
The Royal Hotel offers quite a switch of setting for its Australian director/co-writer, Kitty Green. Her last film, The Assistant (2019), took place in the grey hell of a New York film production office, with a Harvey Weinstein type prowling off-screen and terrifying employees over the phone.
From there, we now jump to an Outback pub, all snakes in jars and sodden misery, in another tale that Green has loosely adapted from a true story. Whatever was once “royal” about this godforsaken watering hole has long succumbed to grime. The lettering outside is barely visible; the patrons are 95 per cent miners, or ex-miners who never left.
What possesses two American backpackers, Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) to take live-in jobs as bar staff within these obviously menacing walls? They’ve run out of money on their travels, and at this late notice, there’s nothing else available. Almost as soon as they’re off the bus, Hanna sees they’ve made a terrible mistake; it’s Liv, the truly broke one, who keeps trying to mollify her and get them to stay.
The landlord is Billy (Hugo Weaving), who gets more soused than anyone; his chef Carol (Ursula Yovich) is palpably at the end of her tether. Pay keeps being delayed, especially to the Aboriginal supplier, who is owed thousands. In Weaving’s skilled hands, Billy’s a gruesomely credible drunkard with one foot in the grave, who calls Hanna the C word in their first scene – she’s almost too astonished to take offence.
One of the obvious touchstones for this slow-burn take on Australia’s drinking culture is Wake in Fright, Ted Kotcheff’s nightmarish 1971 drama about a stranded teacher being coerced and brutalised. The levels of sexual threat here are much more overt, of course: the girls are stared at, lewdly propositioned, baited by banter.
Green has cast the bar’s unsavoury patrons with several of the best young actors in Australia: Snowtown’s Daniel Henshall, with his glinting eyes and Jack Nicholson-esque seediness; Animal Kingdom’s James Frecheville as a confused, possessive loner; and Babyteeth’s superb Toby Wallace as a louche charmer used to getting his way.
Hanna stands up to all of this lot; Liv tends to be a walkover. The script’s a little skimpy on the psychology separating this pair – we’re left to intuit things from their past, what they’re running from. The actresses club together, convincingly filling in the gaps.
Other directors might have escalated this into the zone of outright horror, with gory payback awaiting. Not Green, who has the level intent of keeping it chillingly real. It’s not that the men on screen are shown at their very beastliest in her film. Instead, the shudders it induces depend on being well aware they’re capable of worse.
18 cert, 91 min. In cinemas from Friday November 3
