Kitty Green is one of Australia’s finest filmmakers. From her incredible documentary examining personal bias and ascribing guilt Casting JonBenet, through to her impactful film dealing with entertainment industry predators and their enablers The Assistant, Green’s interest in the human psyche and how it perceives threat is brought into sharp focus with her latest work The Royal Hotel. Using the bones of Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie about two Finnish backpackers who end up in a remote Australian mining town to work in a bar only to find they are figures of every possible kind of exploitation, and mixing it with the commentary on Australia’s toxic drinking culture in Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 masterpiece Wake in Fright, Green creates her own psychological thriller about the dangers young women face in places where ‘civilization’ is not only miles away, but is also something that is perverted through lack of progress.
The Royal Hotel has enough genre tropes for the thriller aspect to be recognisable to international audiences. The story of young women being left to the mercy of the crazed inhabitants of an out of the way town is a horror staple. However, there is something absolutely distinctly Australian about Green’s work. When people think about “The Outback” in Australia they think of dusty roads and blank vistas that seem to stretch for eternity. The titular Royal Hotel is situated in such a place (filmed in South Australia), but it is not just the remoteness of the area that creates a kind of dread, but the people who lose themselves to a place on the map few people could find.
Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) are young Canadian backpackers who start out on a harbour cruise in Sydney. They are partying and making the best of their grand “Down Under” adventure until their credit cards begin to be declined and they realise they will need to get funds to keep going. Agreeing to work in a mining town pub with the idea that it will only be for a few weeks, and they might get to see a kangaroo, they unwittingly become the “fresh meat” property in an area filled with binge drinking where violence is hanging in the air.
Their arrival is heralded by being left in the middle of the road by a bus that doesn’t stop in the town and being bundled into Carol’s (Ursula Yovich) Panel Van and summarily dumped at the Royal Hotel after being ogled by miners waiting for the place to open. It’s filthy, the room they are supposed to be inhabiting still taken up by the two departing British backpackers. They meet the inveterate alcoholic owner of the pub, Billy (Hugo Weaving) from whom the words “smart cunt” are spat at Hanna after he barges in and turns off the water to their showers.
Their first night is a crazed trial by fire where the patrons haze the young women, and they watch their predecessors dance drunkenly on the bar. “This will be us in a few weeks,” Liv notes with more sanguinity than Hanna can muster. One of the locals, Matty (Toby Wallace) explains the makeup of the town. People like Billy whose family have owned the pub for generations, and Carol whose mob are from the area, and the rest “Blow ins come here for the work but can’t find a reason to leave.” Hanna rightly senses they’ve made a mistake in coming to town, but Liv shrugs it off with “It’s like a cultural thing. We’re travelling, we want an adventure.”
The pub patrons are mostly grotesque – from Glenda (Barbara Lowing) and a gamut of hard drinking “ocker blokes” to the more reserved but worrisome Teeth (James Frecheville) who has decided the girls belong to him, to the outright hostile Dolly (Daniel Henshall). Hanna has to work out what is “just a joke” in the Australian vernacular, and what is a legitimate cause to fear for her safety. It’s a dilemma many young women face often. Unlike Liv who is adapting to the conditions with almost nihilistic self-destruction, Hanna stays guarded and becomes known as a “sour cunt” whom Billy blames for the lack of patrons on a quite night.
The one person Hanna begins to vaguely trust is Matty – not really because he has that much to recommend him, but because he’s the least bad of a bad bunch (if one discounts Carol who is at her wit’s end with Billy and doesn’t have time to properly intervene on Hanna and Liv’s account). Through Matty, Liv and Hanna see some of the beauty of the region – a swimming hole called Long Drop. Teeth resents that Matty has taken them out there before he got a chance. “You snooze, you lose” Matty taunts Teeth. Hanna realises they are town property now to be exploited in any manner by a group of unbalanced drunkards. Although she has yet to be assaulted it won’t be long until something devastating happens and she isn’t sure who will be hurt first; herself for being “A fucking grizzly bear” according to Dolly, or Liv who is being particularly reckless and walking into fraught situations.
Green asks the question what is the moment you stop rolling with the punches and launch a pre-emptive defence? She has chosen Julia Garner’s Hanna to be the face of defiance and Garner delivers an impeccable performance. Henwick’s Liz is more difficult to fathom – there is something undefined in her past that drives her to extremes. She chose to come to Australia to be as far away from Canada as possible. Garner is the audience’s surrogate as we wait on tenterhooks for the drunken revelry to move from living nightmare to rape and physical attacks on the women.
“We are not safe,” is something many young women have experienced in their interactions with men from time immemorable. Kitty Green takes the reality of the lived experience of thousands of women and places it in a heightened but recognisable situation. At any moment the powder keg might explode like the firecrackers being let off by an unhinged patron. At any moment a shadow appearing at the door might mean an intruder will break in and attack. Hotel Coolgardie showed how those dangers hung above Lina and Steph like the Sword of Damocles. They were disposable meat. The Royal Hotel drops the sword even lower on Hanna and Liv, creating a foreboding and claustrophobic thriller which speaks to a living culture in Australia. A culture that should long ago have died but continues to thrive in areas where civility is a concept that is unknown and unrecognised.
Director: Kitty Green
Cast: Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, Hugo Weaving
Writers: Kitty Green, Oscar Redding
