The Royal Hotel
Directed by Kitty Green
Written by Kitty Green and Oscar Redding
Starring Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, Herbert Nordrum
Rated R
Runtime: 1 hour, 31 minutes
In theaters October 6

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Horror might be the wrong word if you're a puritanical genre dork, but Kitty Green, director and co-writer of the new film The Royal Hotel, continues to make art that can put a heavier lump in your throat than any slasher ever could.

When Green made her narrative feature debut with The Assistant a few years ago, she put together a quiet, human look at systemic abuse that acted as horror in everything but name. Jane, played by Julia Garner, was a low-level assistant at a film production company in New York and she worked through a long day fielding phone calls and emails from her unseen Harvey Weinstein/Scott Rudin-like boss, trying to ingratiate herself to coworkers and filing a claim with HR. Part of that film's point, an element that kept its sense of dread at the forefront, was a widespread casual cruelty-- the HR rep wasn't committing the same sexual assaults as his boss and the other assistants weren't openly berating Jane, but they were all part of a rotten structure and acted complicitly. Green didn't give the men in her audience an easy out. We couldn't pretend we had a stand-in. Not everybody in The Assistant was an abject monster, but they existed on the same spectrum as the monsters.

The Royal Hotel, Green's follow-up to The Assistant, is an aesthetic 180. Parts are funny. Some of the photography is beautiful and there are a dozen named characters with speaking roles. But Green is still ready to hold your head under the water at every available moment. She (along with her co-writer here, Oscar Redding) is making great, necessary films where everything is considered, and I'm convinced she's everything I hope for in an artist. The movie follows Americans Hanna (Garner, again an inspired center to Green's story) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) traveling around Australia. After running out of money in Sydney, the friends get work at a remote mining town, where they'll spend a few weeks making cash by tending bar at some place called The Royal Hotel, and then move on forever.

Wake in Fright, the great Australian film about an urban school teacher who gets in over his head in a small Outback town, is an unavoidable comparison, and once you clock that, you know where Hanna and Liv are bound to end up. Still, the ambient dread is cut with the kinds of things two young people might see on a vacation. The film opens with an ominous/dancey cover of Men at Work's "Land Down Under" that made me laugh out loud, and after a little confusion, it becomes clear Hanna and Liv are dancing in a club. In a moment that I have to believe references Wake in Fright's kangaroo-hunting sequence, the women drive alongside a kangaroo after having spent so much of the movie asking, like any American would, where they can find one. Green never lets you forget that this is supposed to be a fun vacation. Tonally, there isn't a point of no return, where everybody's doomed and Hanna and Liv are no longer allowed to be two women traveling around a foreign continent to take their minds off something that happened back home. The movie lives in a pocket of tension because our world is a pocket of tension, but this isn't misery porn.

When Hanna and Liv arrive at their new job, they meet the place's co-owners, a couple played by Hugo Weaving and Ursula Yovich. Weaving's character is a blunt drunk, throwing around the word insults and blowing up in anger without notice, in a town where the only thing to do besides work is drink. Yovich plays a survivor, the best case scenario for a woman at The Royal Hotel, still able to assert her agency but hardened by decades of pushing to do so. She knows how terrible The Royal Hotel is and gives Hanna and Liv some support in dealing with her husband and the bar's clientele, but she's stuck there.

And The Royal Hotel is terrible. The same handful of assholes stop by every night, each one sure he's owed Hanna and Liv's attention. They make crude jokes and tell the women to smile, and it's teasing, but nobody in history has ever been comforted by a bully's insistence that he's "just teasing." I especially loved a scene where belligerent drunk Dolly (Daniel Henshall) hits on Hanna at last call. An elderly couple comes in to celebrate their wedding anniversary and do their best to ignore Dolly as he continues to badger their bartender. One member of the couple asks if Hanna's got a boyfriend and the other says "'Course she does, look at her."

That's the spectrum, right there, with even the people Hanna feels comfortable around making little comments that they, like the more openly aggressive Dolly, would hand wave away as casual, friendly conversation. The best you can hope for is somebody commenting on your appearance in a passive, casual way. And neither member of the couple assists Hanna by telling Dolly to stop. As kind as the strangers seem to be, they're ignoring abuse happening a few feet away. Later, when Hanna asks Weaving's character to kick Dolly out, he shrugs and says, "I'd be out of business." He gestures to the bar and says, "I'd have to ban every one of them." Later, somebody gets banned and it doesn't mean anything.

If the movie has a thesis, it's there. As Hanna grows more anxious to get out of town-- not easy when the only bus only comes few days and the bar's owners haven't paid the women for their work-- Liv begrudgingly accepts it, telling Hanna the people at the bar where they're stranded is no worse than the guys they were dancing with in Sydney. It's a great point, but not for the reasons she thinks it is. Green isn't indicting small towns, she's indicting the world, and The Royal Hotel is a snow globe of that.

Even in Sydney, the women pretended to be Canadian, because "everybody likes Canadians." The characters' insecurities, their innate desire to appeal to total strangers, it's all there from the jump. As every character in The Royal Hotel makes excuses for the behavior of every other character, as the seemingly-benign guys look good in comparison with the ones barely concealing violent tendencies, Green is asking if "not openly threatening rape" is really the lowered standard we're willing to measure the good guys by.

That's been so much of the past few years, that annoyed question of whether we should ban every asshole from the bar, that insistence that yeah, he's being a dick, but not as bad a dick as that other guy over there. The behavior of the worst of us ends up providing cover for everybody else and the discussion is flattened until you're the one, true offender or you're just kidding around, relax. The Royal Hotel is not a subtle movie but it's a movie about the subtleties that allow people plausible deniability when they assess whether they've acted inappropriately. I doubt Green would call her film prescriptive, but the ending, as dramatic as it is, feels that way. I won't spoil it, but by the time you get there, it feels like the only fix to any of the issues Green has empathetically and furiously laid bare.