Director: Kitty Green (Australia, UK). Year of Release: 2023
A disco, where a woman is trying to make it to the bar while wading her way through desperate men giving her cheesy chat-up lines. When she reaches the bar, it is hard for the bartender to hear what she’s saying. When she replies that she wants 2 pints of Fosters, she in turn doesn’t hear his reply (is she sure? They have much better beers on offer). Eventually, she gets her order and tries to pay with her card. The machine on the bar declines payment.
As she pushes up the stairs towards the exit, we see that we’re not in the expected subterranean club, but on a boat just about to pass under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The woman finds her friend and asks if she can borrow some money. Her friend is otherwise occupied. Someone has tried a similarly cheesy chat-up line on her, but her reply was a little more amenable. It’s difficult to reach for your purse while you’re snogging a tall Norwegian.
Hanna and Liv are about as far from home as you can be. Depending on which review you read, home is either Canada, or they’re US-Americans pretending to be Canadians to get people to like them. Either way, they’re stuck in Australia and they’re broke. An agency offers them something, where “the only thing that can be a little bothersome is the remoteness of the location.” Well, that and the fact that “you’re gonna have to be comfortable with a little male attention.”
The Royal Hotel is practically the only building in a tiny mining town. It’s a badly-lit pub where tired miners go to drink off their alienation. Apart from a couple of older customers, and Carol, the surly wife of alcoholic bar owner Billy, Hanna and Liv are the only women in town. This means that they are subject to cheap sexism at every opportunity. The blonde Hanna in particular is perpetually accosted by one of the customers who wants to tell her his latest blonde joke.
Particularly persistent is Matty, a man with a permanent smile which I think is supposed to endear him to us, but creeped me out from his very first appearance. Matty tries very hard – too hard – to make a joke about ordering a Dickens Cider (“dick inside her” – get it), but he is never able to make the pun quite work. I’m not sure whether this is a comment on Matty’s awkward command of language or because the script is badly written.
Despite his creepiness, Hanna lets Matty take the pair of them in his car into the desert, in search of somewhere to swim. The showers in the hotel don’t work, and the nearby swimming pool has been drained, so I guess you can see her motivation. And it turns out that they have a perfectly agreeable day at the lake, although as the film proceeds, Hanna takes an increasingly sceptical view of the local men – with some good reason.
Teeth, the man who just sits at the bar and one day clumsily propositions Liv is basically harmless. The equally bizarrely named Dolly is much more of a handful, especially after he’s been drinking. Dolly refuses to leave the bar, even when his drunken behaviour is intimidating the other customers, and one night he follows Hanna to her bedroom – breaking through the chair which she had used to jam the door. He is never explicitly violent, but always somewhat scary.
Hanna tells Liv that she wants to leave, and as quickly as possible. Liv, who started the film playing the gooseberry to her more flirtatious friend, inexplicably switches roles. It is now Liv who drinks too much, to the extent that she agrees to go off with Dolly in his car, even though she is in no state to give any meaningful consent. Hanna – whose mother drank too much – is more wary, and becomes increasingly violent in defence of herself and her friend.
Torsten, the Norwegian from the opening scenes, returns at an opportune moment, and looks as if he is about to disprove the prevailing ideas that men can’t be trusted. It is not that he proves to be especially untrustworthy (the main argument of the film is that you just can’t be sure), more that he soon fades into the background. His (re)appearance just feels so unnecessary. Like many characters, Torsten is drawn in very faint pencil, and we don’t learn enough about him.
One of the reasons why I came to see The Royal Hotel was its very powerful trailer. The film starts in the same vein, showing the increasing isolation of two young women who are very much far from home. It is not that every man is a sexual predator, more that the women have no way of knowing which man might attack them for no reason. The normalised sexism which is prevalent in the bar where they work just intensifies the sense of fear.
And yet, from such a promising start, the film goes … well, nowhere really. Having built up the atmosphere so strongly, you feel that the writers must be about to take us somewhere interesting, but – apart from a final action which is not in the feel of the rest of the film – nothing really happens. Although Hanna and Liv are individually well acted, you never really feel that they like each other, let along are best friends since childhood.
It is all a bit of a shame. Maybe I was expecting too much, or something different to a film which was intending more to creep us out than to tell us a story. But it all felt too insubstantial. We never learned much about the motivation of any of the characters. This is less of a problem with the men, as part of the film’s scariness lies in not quite knowing how much of a threat they pose. But the leading women were equally imprecisely written, leading us not to care enough about them.
I guess it’s better that a film doesn’t live up to its promise than it having no promise in the first place, but a frustrating experience.
CinePhil 