Unlike in The Assistant, turmoil is in motion in director Kitty Green’s follow-up The Royal Hotel, a tense and unsettling thriller of sorts that plays to women’s fear of having to adhere to the rules of men.
The average moviegoer would call The Royal Hotel more of a drama that makes you feel uneasy but it’s a million times more accessible—and most importantly, more engrossing—than The Assistant, which also starred Julia Garner (I’m in the “literally nothing happens” camp of that movie, an apparent outlier in the critic community).
In The Royal Hotel, Garner plays Hanna, a bit of a stick-in-the-mud character who travels with her more adventurous friend Liv (also a young, beautiful woman played by Jessica Henwick) to a mining outpost in the middle of the Outback to work in a bar for a few weeks to make some cash. They are literally in the middle of nowhere with no way to leave (a bus comes once a week)—and are the only two young women in town in a place where the only thing to do for the numerous young men around is to get drunk and be rowdy.
Hanna is instantly uncomfortable and, in true Garner fashion, wears her discomfort on her face. One could argue that had she leaned in (and, as one drunken old lady suggests to her, to “lean forward”) her experience might be different, but that’s also sort of the point: Hanna finds herself trapped in a place where the only way to survive is to adapt to and navigate the lusts of men. She’s not adaptable, and why does she have to be?
The Royal Hotel puts on display what a clash of ideal existence and reality can look like: women shouldn’t have to smile at threats to get by, but in reality it’s arguably safer.
Green does a superb job of capturing a growing and constant sense of dread in what otherwise could be a mundane setting—and story. The cast, most notably Garner, elevate the material; they’re like different chemical compounds thrown together, an explosion inevitable.
In the end, The Royal Hotel may not quite be explosive enough for many viewers, but the entire production left me feeling properly uncomfortable and uneasy. The ending itself works more as a symbolic gesture than a literal one, but the point is well taken.
Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.