A weak and anticlimactic ending sadly deflates this movie from Australian director Kitty Green, who gave us the gripping #MeToo drama The Assistant from 2019. It’s a shame, as The Royal Hotel had been developing as a very tense and well acted psychological thriller and outback noir, but the ultimate scares somehow go missing along with any satisfying plot resolutions.
As co-writer with Oscar Redding, Green takes her inspiration from Hotel Coolgardie, a tough and disturbing documentary about a chaotically rough pub in remote Western Australia which periodically hires female backpackers to work behind the bar. But the young women who do the job soon realise that this isn’t a wacky place like the one in Crocodile Dundee, but the home of nasty and sinister sexism with threat behind the banter.
For this fictional version, Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick play Hanna and Liv; their money runs out in the middle of their Australian travels and are forced to take a dodgy-sounding job at the Royal Hotel in the dusty middle of nowhere, dealing with the boozy miners who pack the place. The owner is alcoholic depressive Billy (Hugo Weaving) but the pub is kept afloat by the hard work of Carol (Ursula Yovich), who is patronised and exploited like other Indigenous Australians there. Liv learns to go with the flow and laugh off the misogyny but Hanna is increasingly creeped out.
And where are we going with all the threat in the atmosphere? Well, no very good answer is forthcoming to that; perhaps the nonfictional source material has led to a generic uncertainty, a failure to make this clearly a scary movie or clearly a drama. But there’s a lot to admire in the performances from Garner, Henwick, Yovich and Weaving.
• The Royal Hotel is released on 3 November in UK and Irish cinemas.
