The Royal Hotel
Directed by Kitty Green
(R) ★★★✩
Two outsiders endure unwelcome male attention.
Kitty Green and Julia Garner make quite a team, said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. The Australian filmmaker and the Ozark actress rattled moviegoers with The Assistant, 2019’s “deeply unnerving” portrait of a young woman working for a Harvey Weinstein–like movie bigwig. The Royal Hotel, their second collaboration, turns out to be “another masterfully constructed pressure cooker about the perils of being a woman on planet Earth.” Garner and Jessica Henwick play Hanna and Liv, two cash-poor American backpackers who detour to a remote Australian mining town to take a bartending gig at a pub where the sex-starved male patrons circle them like predators. “Few movies have ever so palpably conveyed the violent pall of male attention.”
Though some of the local roughnecks are harmless enough, this “ulcer-inducing” thriller “gets us looking for danger in every scene,” said Amy Nicholson in Variety.
The temperature of the room changes depending on whether Hanna and Liv are serving the oafish jokester, the polite but possessive “nice guy,” or the mean drunk. “Every scene is as gripping as it is pointed,” because Green “has thought everything out,” and Garner “has a gift for revealing the churn inside a character who rarely feels safe enough to say what she thinks.” For decades, movies have conditioned us to brush off inappropriate male behavior as boys being boys, said Alissa Wilkinson in Vox. “It’s still a little jarring to see films in which female protagonists simply refuse to play along.”