Australian director Kitty Green follows the skin-crawling psychological torture of 2019’s The Assistant with the brilliant, nerve-shredding The Royal Hotel, cementing her status as one of the very best in the game at showing a woman’s eye view of a male-dominated world. Tonally, the two films are poles apart: The Assistant’s blanched grey colour palette and buttoned-up terror in thrall to the unseen Weinstein-esque studio boss is a stark contrast to The Royal Hotel’s setting – the simmering, overheated and over-lubricated chaos of a flyblown bar in the Australian outback. But both films capture the urgent micro-calculations and instinctive second-by-second risk assessments of being a woman in an environment where a single misstep could be ruinous. The two pictures have another thing in common: both star the consistently superb Julia Garner.
Garner plays Hanna, an American backpacker who, along with her broke travelling companion Liv (Jessica Henwick), is forced to take a temporary job in a bar in an isolated mining community. Scratch away the sticky patina of spilled beer dregs, and the crackling threat of Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright is an obvious reference. But that powder keg combination of boredom and booze takes on an added dimension for a young woman, faced with the kind of eye contact that feels like an assault and unreadable smiles that show teeth and what might be malign intent.
A psychological thriller, it’s all the more tense for Green’s smart understatement of the genre elements. The discordant score, for example, is mixed so low that it’s almost subliminal – an uneasy hint that there’s nothing funny about these men who are “just having a laugh”.
