‘The Royal Hotel’ Review: Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick Find Out the Danger of Simply Being a Woman in Kitty Green’s Outback Thriller | Telluride

On a party boat heading into the harbor of Sydney, Australia, we find Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick), two American best friends in the middle of their vacation. The girls are drinking, dancing, and having the time of their lives. Everything is going great until Liv tries to pay for their next round of drinks and the girls realize that they’re broke. Once they get off the boat, they head to the nearest job agency, and are sent to the one place that can take them on as workers, the titular Royal Hotel. It is there where Kitty Green’s second feature film solely takes place, and much like her debut The Assistant, she is able to take a single location story and squeeze every ounce of tension she can to make one of the tensest thrillers of the year.

Inspired by true events that occurred in the 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie, the two girls strap their backpacks on and set out for the little bar in the heart of the Australian Outback. Liv’s optimism about this new adventure is met with an almost equal amount of skepticism from her best friend Hanna. It provides the audience the right perspective early on of this friendship dynamic that plays throughout the film, as Liv is the wild one who’s always looking for the next fun thing, and Hannah is practical and able to sense whether any other situation is good for the duo. In this lies the first and major reason why Green’s films work, and that is the committed duel performances from Garner and Henwick, whose chemistry is perfect throughout the sleek 91-minute runtime.

When they arrive, they see that the bar is hanging on by a thread. Billy (an always exceptional Hugo Weaving), the owner of the bar, has collected debt from not paying the bar’s many bills over the course of several months. This debt leads him to drink himself to death, to the point of blacking out and having to be carried back to his motorhome located in the bar’s parking lot. Billy’s current state is a burden on the shoulders of Carol (Ursula Yovich), who is not only the head cook of the bar and the one who is really in charge, but she is also romantically involved with Billy. The film presents an interesting relationship that the toll of alcohol has on not only Billy, but everyone around the bar, and can even sink the girls down a rabbit hole that puts them in danger.

The girls quickly learn not only that their bartending job is built on a complicated system created by Billy that only he can really understand, but they are completely alone in trying to make this situation work. Their rooms are filthy and unorganized, and a daily shower is completely out of the question. Still, Liv, much more than Hannah, tries to make it work, seeing the fun that can be had through the eyes of the two girls they are replacing, who are having the time of their lives on their last night at the Royal Hotel. In serving a packed house for their first night, we are introduced to a mostly male, working class group of regulars that are looking to drink as much as they can every chance they get time off of their work. The bar is the center of their world, a place where they can come and be as wild as they want to be. With every beer poured and served, you can feel Green building the tension, putting Hanna and Liv at extreme risk of being taken advantage of by a town full of men who know they can get away with pretty much anything in this environment.

As the night goes on, Hannah meets Matty (Toby Wallace), a local astronomer who has eyes for the young American and wants to show her and Liv that the place that they are staying at isn’t so bad. One of the best scenes in the film is a road trip sequence, filled with Matty serenading the girls with a little Kylie Minogue, taking them to a watering hole, and even getting to see some kangaroos on the way back. It is the peak happiness that the girls had been searching for on their trip. But things change that night when Matty makes his move on Hanna, and when she rejects him, he becomes angry and goes to sleep in his car. Their relationship is never the same as Hanna can’t shake off how forceful his advances from that night of drinking. Garner’s eyes at the conclusion this scene and every moment throughout the rest of the film tell a story within themselves about the ongoing danger women have to go through on a daily basis and how their guard must remain high when dealing with men who clearly don’t have any intention in treating them with an ounce of decency. 

When Matty starts associating with Dolly (Daniel Henshall), a regular to the bar who is massively intimating to Hanna, she really doesn’t want anything to do with him. She sensed from the moment she met Dolly that he was not someone to be trusted, even catching him wandering to their rooms one night, drunk as a skunk, looking to do something horrible probably. Her mind is going to the worst possible ideas of what Dolly could do because he is unpredictable, scary, and like most men in this town, have no one really to put them in their place if they are doing something wrong like harassing two visiting girls. Henshall gives a bone-shilling performance, culminating in a moment where he explodes with terror as he makes one last attempt to get Hanna to smile and have a drink with him at the bar. He, alongside Wallace and every other male performance in The Royal Hotel, represents the dangerous, unchecked power of possession that men think they have over women, with even one character saying “she’s mine” when referring to Liv because he has a crush on her.

In the midst of all this tension reaching its breaking point, Hanna tries to convince Liv that they have to leave before it gets too late and they are consumed by the environment they are living in. But Liv continues to give the bar and everyone in it the benefit of the doubt until she consumes so much alcohol that she completely loses to the spell of the Royal Hotel. This leaves Hanna with no choice but to fight back and save not just herself, but the very soul of her friend that has been corrupted by these men’s desires. Garner gives another marvelous performance that matches the urgency and self-aware terror she faced in her last collaboration with Green. Matching her scene to scene is Henwick, in her best performance to date, as Liv, whose sense of adventure is used against her, and is forced into believing that there is anyone you can trust in the world more than Hanna.

Kitty Green set out to break all expectations of what a road trip could do. She created a film that is expertly built on the idea of building the fear of what happens to girls like Hanna and Liv across the world, and not providing an ounce of relief to the audience along the way. The Royal Hotel is proof that Green, with her two narrative films, has already become a vital filmmaker whose specialty lies in creating tension and examining the dangers that men inflict on women, and how hopeless everything feels in the end.

Grade: B+

This review is from the 2023 Telluride Film Festival. NEON will release The Royal Hotel in the U.S.