THE ROYAL HOTEL
15 ★★★★
Cert In cinemas now
In 2020’s The Assistant, Aussie film-maker Kitty Green told the story of a vulnerable young woman taking a job in the New York office of an abusive movie mogul. As Harvey Weinstein’s court case was still months away, she couldn’t name her massage-loving villain.
Her follow-up is another fact-based film about toxic masculinity, although this time it feels like an entire nation is on trial.
Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) play Americans backpacking around Australia. When they run out of cash, they
take jobs as barmaids. “You’re going to have to be OK with a little male attention,” says the woman in the job agency, after signing them up for a live-in gig in an Outback boozer.
Brits may not be the masters of understatement after all.
When they arrive at the remote Royal Hotel, they are greeted by a homemade sign. A local wag has written ‘fresh meat’ alongside a hastily rendered drawing of a pair of breasts.
That may seem over the top if you haven’t seen the 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie, which recounted the similar experiences of two Finnish backpackers and inspired Green’s fiction. So Hanna wants to get
the first bus back to Melbourne but Liv is more tolerant of “cultural differences”.
As the girls deliver tinnies to a rogues’ gallery of hulking, leering Aussie blokes, Green ratchets up the tension. With the landlord (Hugo Weaving) always one beer away from collapsing, he doesn’t pose too much of a threat. But the miners who prop up the bar are something else.
As naive Liv enjoys drunken chats with one especially sinister local, a rift develops between her and sensible Hanna. It all feels horribly believable until we get to the overblown finale.
Still, the marketing geniuses behind those Visit Australia ads will be crying into their barbies.