In 2019, writer-director Kitty Green teamed up with “Ozark” star Julia Garner for the searing and unsettling “The Assistant,” a workplace psychological drama about a newly hired employee at a Tribeca film production company that is oozing with male toxicity and run by a monstrous and unseen studio boss clearly modeled after Harvey Weinstein. Four years later, Green and Garner have paired for the equally disturbing “The Royal Hotel,” which is set primarily in a seedy Australian hotel/bar in the middle of nowhere. If this place isn’t hell, it’s a stopover you’d make along the way.
Green and co-writer Oscar Redding based the script of “The Royal Hotel” on the 2016 documentary “Hotel Coolgardie,” which told the story of two young Finnish backpackers who took jobs in an Australian mining-town pub, with harrowing consequences.
