THE ROYAL HOTEL - Mark Reviews Movies

The Royal Hotel, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 5, 2023

Watching The Royal Hotel, one phrase keeps coming to mind: Boys will be boys. That's an excuse, dressed up as some kind of self-evident justification, and it's often cited when no children are involved in the behavior that needs to be excused.

Such is the case the people surrounding our protagonists in co-writer/director Kitty Green's film. They're not boys, but grown, adult men who should know better than to tease, intimidate, and threaten two young women with the bad luck of having to spend a couple of weeks in their company. Some of these men do know better or at least seem to. How much of that appearance can be trusted, though?

There's almost a pack mentality on display here in a remote mining town in Australia. All of the men become caught up in it in some way—because of the abundance of alcohol after a long day of work, because they don't want to cause trouble with what looks to be the majority of their peers, because it's just who some of these men, regardless of booze or peer pressure. Green and co-screenwriter Oscar Redding have basically given us a horror story, in which nearly everyone around our main characters is simultaneously normal and deeply suspicious. The terror here is that "normal" in this case is inherently deserving of at least a little bit of suspicion—often more than a little.

Those two young women are Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick), who are currently on a long vacation away from home (They say Canada, but that's a common trick of American travelers at times when the country's reputation isn't exactly sterling). Partying in Sydney on a booze cruise, Liv discovers that she's out of money and her credit card is maxed out, so it's time for the pair to come up with a way to make some cash in order to salvage whatever is left of their vacation.

At an employment office, they're offered a temporary job working at a pub in the middle of nowhere. It's important, the employment agent points out, that the two are comfortable receiving attention from men, because the place is often filled with workers from the local mine. Liv smirks at the thought, because she is on vacation, after all, and attention from some rugged men might be exactly what she does want under the circumstances. Hanna's hesitant about the whole thing, because this was supposed to be a nice, relaxing getaway, not an opportunity to work and get a lot of "attention"—whatever that's supposed to mean—from complete strangers.

Said attention is, well, questionable from the start and even before it really begins. For example, there's Billy (Hugo Weaving), the pub's owner, who meets Hanna and Liv when he bursts into the bathroom as the two are in towels and getting ready to shower. The place isn't set up for such amenities, apparently, but instead of excusing himself or apologizing for the obvious intrusion, he calls Hanna a vulgar term that Liv just thinks her friend has misinterpreted because of cultural differences. Has she, though, or does the notion of it being a "cultural thing" point at the specific culture in which they've found themselves at the moment?

The plot, such as it is, is basically a gradual escalation of similar instances. Hanna and Liv start working their first night there, met with a packed barroom of loud men, four women—a local who holds her own, Billy's partner Carol (Ursula Yovich) working in the kitchen, and the two young women whom the pair are replacing—who are swept up in or keeping distance from what's going on, and declining inhibitions as the beer and liquor keep being served.

Right away, we get a sense of the key players in the drama that will unfold around Hanna and Liv. There's Dolly (Daniel Henshall), a guy whose entire personality appears to revolve around getting drunk and making himself the center of attention. There's Matty (Toby Wallace), who has a soft face and a quiet demeanor—except that he's really trying to get Hanna's attention. In between those extremes, perhaps, is Teeth (James Frenchville), a muscular guy who seems to have appointed himself the pub's protector—especially, now, in terms of keeping an eye on how his peers treat Liv.

It would, of course, be easy to write off all of this as what's to be expected from a room filled with tired, lonely, and increasingly drunk men. Liv can do that just fine, and for a while, Hanna more or less does the same. Once she walks in on one of the guys having sex with one of the women—who was drinking even more than any of the workers—the pair are replacing, Hanna gets a clear glimpse of just how vulnerable she and Liv might be. These men have certain expectations of the women working the bar, and even after locking the door, some of them seem able to get in and out of the pub with ease.

This is a thriller, then, albeit one that plays in a subtle key, in the way it observes behavior, both with drink and in periods of sobriety, and trusts us to note how these characters change, don't change, or just reveal who they really are beneath some veneer of being nice, loud, or protective. The men of The Royal Hotel may appear to be different, but as the film slices away layer after layer of those external personalities, the frightening thing is how much alike all of them are.

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