Critics have hailed Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel as an “even deeper” and “pulpier and more explosive” look at toxic masculinity than her 2019 #MeToo thriller The Assistant, with many drawing comparisons between the film and Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 classic Wake in Fright.
The Royal Hotel is Green’s second narrative feature and her first to be made in her native Australia. It screened this week at the Toronto International Film Festival after making its debut in Telluride the week prior. In early October the film will go on to the BFI London Film Festival in official competition, before hitting our shores via SXSW Sydney and the Adelaide Film Festival.
Inspired by the 2017 observational documentary Hotel Coolgardie by filmmaker Pete Gleeson, the See-Saw Films production stars Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick as Hanna and Liv, two best friends backpacking around Australia.
After they run out of money, Liv, looking for an adventure, convinces Hanna to take a temporary live-in job in a pub in a remote Outback mining town. Bar owner Billy, played by Hugo Weaving, and a host of locals give the girls a riotous introduction to Down Under drinking culture but things turn nasty when their jokes and behaviour cross the line. Soon Hanna and Liv find themselves trapped in an unnerving situation that grows rapidly out of their control. Toby Wallace, James Frecheville, Daniel Henshall and Ursula Yovich also star.
Green co-wrote the script with Oscar Redding, while See-Saw’s Emile Sherman, Iain Canning and Liz Watts produce with Scarlett Pictures’ Kath Shelper.
The Royal Hotel is a reunion for Green and Garner, with the latter starring in the titular role in The Assistant. The consensus among reviewers is that Green’s latest takes the themes of her first and “turns up the volume and ratchets up the fear and loathing”, as Sheri Linden put it in The Hollywood Reporter.
In Screen Daily, Tim Grierson described The Royal Hotel as a “nerve-racking tale of toxic masculinity”.
“As a study in nonstop microaggressions and gaslighting, The Royal Hotel gets under the skin, the two diminutive actresses dwarfed by the intimidating men towering around them. (As the permissive pub owner, Weaving is appropriately loathsome, the character’s sexism as pungent as his boozy breath.) The film’s tight tonal control wavers a bit in the final stretches, but Green externalises her characters’ inner anguish in a persuasive manner.”
Indiewire’s David Ehrlich described the film as a “masterfully constructed pressure cooker about the perils of being a woman on planet Earth”, one that was “much pulpier and more visceral than The Assistant (which was a veritable chamber piece), but no less exacting.”
“The Royal Hotel is flecked with scenes that could’ve been lifted out of a classic horror movie (one spine-tingling bit, in which drunken men prowl the upstairs hallways like zombies, confirms that Green has the skill to make top-tier Hollywood schlock, should she ever feel like debasing herself), but much of the film’s genius is rooted in its frog boiling in water realism,” he wrote.
“Few movies have ever so palpably or intricately conveyed the violent pall of male attention.”
Little White Lies’ Mark Asch called Green “a master of the microaggression”.
“She calibrates moments of ambiguity and ominousness, and maps out the subtle ways in which young women are recruited over to the far side of their own boundaries,” he wrote.
“After the self-contained and simmering Assistant this feels like Green’s attempt to make similar material more accessible.”
Writing for Deadline, Pete Hammond was effusive of the lead actors’ work, as well as production designer Leah Popple and cinematographer Michael Latham for creating an atmosphere as “pitch perfect”.
“Garner… is excellent here as Hanna, a young woman never really into the idea of working at this place but trying to put the best face on what is left of their vacation. British actress Henwick is perfect as the more free wheeling best friend who maybe should have listened to her BFF a little sooner. Australian acting legend Weaving is superb as Billy, who uses vile terms for women, a complete misogynist who perhaps knows his place is a dive but turns the other way when the paying customers get a bit rowdy,” he wrote.
Hammond also described Green as a “sharp filmmaking talent” who confidently handles “the escalating drama, and especially the horrors of too much alcohol, with expert skill even if the action hits a crescendo that takes it into different territory at the end.”
“Contrasting this to the quiet, slow burning style of The Assistant is impressive and makes me want to see what else she has up her sleeve. There is no doubt she is becoming an important feminist voice in the movie business, at least on the basis of these two most recent films.”