Review: The Royal Hotel (2023)

Trapped in a remote locale, two young women battle for survival

Julia Garner (l.) and Jessica Henwick in “The Royal Hotel”

The Royal Hotel (2023)
Written and directed by Kitty Green
Co-written by Oscar Redding

This British-Australian co-production puts two young Canadian women, Hanna and Liv (Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick), into the serious middle of nowhere, Australia. They're backpackers running out of money for their trip, and they get this temporary gig as barmaids at a pub. Planning to stay only as long as it takes to get money to go onto a lovelier Australian destination, they're the focus of unwanted attention from the pub's customers -- all miners.

To call the setting isolated is an understatement. There's the building, the so-called Royal Hotel, pub on the bottom, a few rooms on the floor above, where the women bunk. That's it -- there's no town, no store, no houses, no gas station, *nothing*. The mine is nearby but we never see it. It's an unspecified hike from the highway, where the only bus out goes by twice a week. Oh, also no police. In other words, they're trapped.

Not many people would put themselves in this situation -- in fact, they are gently warned when they accept the job at an agency in Sydney -- but they have no other obvious way to get money. This desperation leads them into the job and keeps them there after the first night, when they find that the miners are exactly the roughnecks you'd expect.

The script gives them almost no backup. Other movies might have a sympathetic but damaged law enforcement officer, or an alluring lesbian rancher, or another temporary worker. Here they only have the  alcoholic pub owner (Hugo Weaving in a fine performance), who inherited it from his father and grandfather who ran it during the hotel's evident better days, and his indigenous companion (Ursula Yovich) to help, and often fail, to keep order and lessen the menace to their barmaids. Then again, order is a relative concept in this setting. A drunken fistfight, aggressive sexist behavior, and assumptions by the miners that eventually, through seduction or threat, they're wear the women down, are par for the course.

Accomplished writer-director Kitty Green uses horror-movie techniques to enhance the menacing mood, and reduces the characters’ options until they're down to this: just how much pushback and confrontation are they going to have to use to escape this place alive?

Julia Garner as a blonde North American whose skin remains blindingly white throughout the film as a symbol of how she holds herself apart from the setting and its inescapable blazing sun, and Jessica Henwick as a sloppier, less scared woman (whom this viewer saw as possibly a Canadian-Indigenous actress but is in fact the child of a Singaporean-Chinese mother, according to Wikipedia) put in good, tense performances. Old pro Hugo Weaving is very good as the helpless pub owner.