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‘The Royal Hotel’ Review: Pulling Pints and Watching Their Backs

Two young women struggle to handle the obstreperous patrons of a remote Australian pub in this coolly calibrated thriller.

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Two women stand at the wooded railing balcony of a building.

By Jeannette Catsoulis

We are barely 12 minutes into Kitty Green’s “The Royal Hotel” before the first C-word is dropped, but it isn’t gratuitous. The film’s language, dominated by the braying of obnoxious, bellies-to-the-bar boozehounds, is both spice and thickening agent in its pervasive mood of clammy menace. Our reward for enduring this relentless churn of apprehension is not the one we anticipate.

Teasing expectations — to some viewers’ ultimate disappointment, no doubt — is much of what this keenly calibrated thriller is about, the familiarity of its setup raising our most bloodthirsty horror-movie hopes. Place two young, attractive female backpackers in a forlorn mining town somewhere in the Australian Outback; surround them with sex-starved, boorish miners; allow them no access to cell service or reliable transport. Their ensuing trials are a cyst that Green and her co-writer, Oscar Redding, take their sweet time to lance.

Until then, we must gnaw our fingernails as Hanna and Liv (Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick, both terrific) refresh their finances by working as live-in bartenders in the titular establishment. The hotel’s dilapidation — to say nothing of its grubby, grabby, mostly male clientele — is a far cry from the yacht parties the women were recently enjoying in Sydney. The bar owner (an indispensable Hugo Weaving) is a raging alcoholic, yet his girlfriend (Ursula Yovich) seems kind and possibly protective. And while one regular (Daniel Henshall) is frankly terrifying, another (Toby Wallace) is so clean and cute that his off-color humor is easier to ignore. At what point should the women feel alarmed enough to leave?

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Review: Check into ‘The Royal Hotel’ for well-wrought dread that’s all too familiar to women

Two women stand on the balcony of a remote hotel.

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The walls are scabbed. The strip lighting is dingy. The decor is cheap: liquor bottles and dead snakes pickled in jars. Kitty Green ’s queasily gripping “The Royal Hotel” is set in a location neither regal nor much of a hotel.

But if the grandiose name of this crummy dive — an isolated outback bar catering to the scattered, largely male regional mining community — has ever attracted so much as an ironic comment, it was a long time ago and no one can be bothered to make that joke anymore. Perhaps irony, like water for the swimming pool, is a resource that dries up seasonally in these parts, leaving only a dust bowl of surly resentment and some tatty deckchairs behind.

Green’s expertly calibrated movie takes place in surroundings we rarely see outside the grislier class of slasher movie, one that seems built purely to have things go on in it that no one will ever care to recall. Certainly, it’s a place that two nice young American women (who know enough about the reputation of American tourists to claim to be Canadian) partying away an Australian vacation, would never ordinarily wash up in. But best friends Liv (Jessica Henwick) and Hanna (Green’s “The Assistant” star Julia Garner) experience a sudden shortage of funds that forces them off the Sydney harbor party-boat circuit and into the only jobs available on a work-travel program. Which is how they find themselves stumbling off the twice-weekly bus to the derrière of nowhere, squinting at a dirt track that only seems to lead to more dirt.

They’re brought to the bar by Carol (Ursula Yovich), the no-nonsense Indigenous cook who is the only person to exert any influence on bar owner Billy (Hugo Weaving), who’s as fond of a drink as he is of the casual deployment of the C-word. Liv and Hanna have been drafted (“Fresh Meat” reads a scrawled sign outside) to replace two British girls who, on their last night, get falling-off-the-bar, spilling-out-of-their-tube-tops drunk.

“That’ll be us in a few weeks,” remarks Liv dryly, but the very presence of these other women does quell some of the new arrivals’ fears. Sure, the clientele is rowdy, but if those girls survived — and even seemed to wildly enjoy — their stint, why can’t Liv and Hanna? A wickedly sharp taxonomy of all the different types of aggression that men too long in only one another’s company can visit on women, “The Royal Hotel” is an exposé of the kind of false sisterhood that plays women’s choices against each other. These women were all right with being treated like this, so if you’re not, that’s on you.

It’s a rift that Green works cleverly into the relationship between Liv and Hanna, with Hanna ready to flee from the get-go, while Liv wants to stick it out, minimizing or downplaying the potential threat with the faintest of “chill out” eye-rolls. Initially, she prevails, so when the Brits leave in a haze of smashed bottles and drunken sex, Liv and Hanna have to face the next night without them absorbing any of the “male attention” they’d been warned about back in Sydney.

Gradually the men of the Royal Hotel come into focus as individuals, in such a way that disgruntled mens’ rights activists should rejoice: Far from flattening all the male characters into one malevolent archetype, Green shows just what an excitingly varied spectrum of toxicity exists in masculine behavior. From a general chorus of barflies and leering regulars who apparently derive pleasure from the thought of shocking a pretty girl with a dirty joke, there emerges cheerful, cheeky Matty (Toby Wallace); a slow-witted, scarred miner known only as Teeth ( “Animal Kingdom’s ” James Frecheville); and the indefinably creepy Dolly (another skin-crawlingly sinister turn from Daniel Henshall of “Snowtown” infamy), who just wants Hanna to smile a bit more.

Although inspired by Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary “Hotel Coolgardie,” “The Royal Hotel” is a more genre-inflected drama than the forensic dissection of #MeToo complicity that was “The Assistant.” But it is similarly single-minded, deriving much of its pressure-cooker tension from the precise re-creation of situations in which we, as spectators, catch ourselves judging Liv and Hanna’s actions. When the two of them clamber down into the dry pool basin for a box-wine picnic; when Liv gets sloppy drunk on her birthday; when Hanna, shocked sober by the sound of Dolly’s footsteps outside, turns the flimsy lock in fright — every nerve screams: Don’t you know not to get yourself into something you can’t easily get out of?

Jessica Henwick, left, and Julia Garner in 'The Royal Hotel.'

How Kitty Green’s ‘The Royal Hotel’ refuses to play by the rules of horror

The Australian filmmaker adapted a documentary into an intense outback thriller starring Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick as two women working at a remote pub.

Oct. 5, 2023

But we are watching a movie. Hanna and Liv are not. And each interaction is, for them, a strange negotiation between wanting to be safe and the almost equally powerful desire to be cool, to be chill, to not be a drag. Women get blamed for being uptight right until something irrevocably awful happens, at which point they’re to blame for being blind.

“The Royal Hotel” moves in a straight line, but does play a little with this ambiguity. Indeed, there are several other versions of this deceptively smart film that, taking the exact same events from the perspective of Teeth, or Billy or Torsten (Herbert Nordrum), the dopey Scando tourist Hanna kissed in Sydney who shows up as a hilariously ineffectual rescuer, would simply play out as some version of “the time those American girls who didn’t know how to have a good time came out here and just couldn’t handle it.”

So it goes when the dominant culture is one that regards predatory masculinity as a fact of life, as ungovernable and unalterable as the weather, and puts it on women to constantly be checking the skies to judge whether it’s safe to leave the house. It’s all so horribly familiar — even for those who have never traveled, never tended bar, and never found themselves the only female in a roomful of drunken, lonely men. The central terror of Green’s ferociously tense, intelligent movie is the terror of recognition.

'The Royal Hotel'

Rated: R, for language throughout and sexual content/nudity Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes Playing: In limited release Oct. 6

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‘the royal hotel’ review: julia garner and jessica henwick in kitty green’s bruising outback drama.

Two American backpackers sign on as temporary workers at a remote Australian pub in a narrative feature inspired by a documentary.

By Sheri Linden

Sheri Linden

Senior Copy Editor/Film Critic

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Four years after director Kitty Green and actor Julia Garner channeled whispers and silence into the stuff of workplace horror in The Assistant , they reunite for a movie that turns up the volume and ratchets up the fear and loathing. Way up.

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The Royal Hotel Review

“You’re going to have to be okay with a little male attention,” the agency worker says. Liv (Jessica Henwick) grins slowly, glancing at a straight-faced Hanna (Julia Garner). “Yeah, we’ll be fine,” Liv says, accepting temp work at a pub in the Aussie outback on behalf of them both, bolstered by the promise of seeing kangaroos. Hanna doesn’t seem so sure. She is, as you might expect, right to be reluctant.

From the second Liv and Hanna arrive at their new location, the atmosphere is unsettling. The sun beats down on the dry, dusty, endless brown landscape — just looking at it makes you thirsty. The lady who picks them up (Carol, played with quiet strength by Ursula Yovich) is brisk and unsmiling. Their living space is strewn with chaos generated by the British girls they’re taking over from. They’re yelled at by pub owner Billy (an almost unrecognisable Hugo Weaving) for turning the water on. This set-up is enough to put anyone at unease. But as soon as the doors open, that feeling ramps up, as a mob of rowdy locals, mostly men, descend on the bar — demanding drinks, yelling rude jokes, and telling the girls to smile.

There are flickers of joy amid the stress, found in a trip to a nearby swimming spot, sunbathing with booze in a box, and some tender romantic moments between Hanna and regular punter Matty ( Babyteeth ’s Toby Wallace). But mostly, The Royal Hotel is a stomach-churning slide into full-on dread, as the girls become more vulnerable, their working conditions more precarious, and the men’s attention and actions towards them start to cross a line. Director Kitty Green isn’t afraid to let the camera sit in the awkward moments, the heavy silences, and the increasingly fraught conversations between Liv and Hanna, as the latter tries to convince the former to leave. Green and co-writer Oscar Redding’s script perfectly captures the delicate nature of the power dynamics on display, and how the girls — particularly Hanna — have to swing between playing nice to stay safe and standing their ground.

Garner is the lead, and gives an incredibly controlled, convincing turn.

Liv and Hanna are in this together, but Garner is the lead, and gives an incredibly controlled, convincing turn as the protective, hyper-vigilant friend that has to keep their shit together. Henwick is excellent as the more easygoing, prone-to-attracting-trouble Liv, who’s clearly using travelling as a way to escape something back home that Hanna isn’t — and the sense that this pair have each other’s backs at all times deepens their characters in a way that doesn’t require excess backstory. Wallace is magnetic as a charming scoundrel, lovable until he isn’t; The Worst Person In The World ’s Herbert Nordrum is fantastically goofy as Norwegian party boy Torsten; and Daniel Henshall is absolutely bone-chilling as especially tricky customer Dolly.

This volatile concoction all comes to a crescendo — one that does deliver on shocks, violence and catharsis, but not quite to perhaps the level you might expect, given the physical and emotional state the preceding 80 minutes have put you in. The Royal Hotel manages to leave you wanting more while making you glad it’s over simultaneously. It’s at once frustrating in its quickness to end, and subversive in its unwillingness to let the men harassing Liv and Hanna have their way. However you feel when the credits roll, the exhilarating time spent in the film’s harsh, unforgiving world feels absolutely worth it.

'The Royal Hotel' review: An intense feminist road trip that takes one wrong turn

Jessica Henwick and Julia Garner in "The Royal Hotel."

Kitty Green's The Royal Hotel is a concise, nail-biting movie about the world as experienced by women, and the aggressive (and often unspoken) impositions that define the male spaces around them. It follows Liv (Jessica Henwick) and Hanna (Julia Garner), two American backpackers in the Australian outback as they spend a couple of weeks bartending in a rural mining town to make some cash. It's a keenly observed piece that blooms in jagged and discomforting ways, with skin-crawling detours where nothing necessarily goes off the rails, but the possibility always lingers.

However, it also builds to a climax whose cathartic framing feels ever so slightly unearned, and whose narrow perspective (from a racial standpoint) leaves a bitter aftertaste. As a whole, it stands as both a feminist filmmaking triumph, yet one that exposes the limitations of both white feminism and Western feminism, in a broader colonial context. Which is unfortunate, because its climactic flub is a mere matter of a handful of concluding shots to what is otherwise a spectacular artistic feat.

The Royal Hotel follows a vacation gone wrong.

Green — whose last film, The Assistant , was a much quieter deconstruction of male power — begins her latest with pulsating energy, at a nightclub aboard a fancy yacht in Sydney, where Liv and Hanna introduce themselves as Canadian tourists. "People like Canadians," Liv explains. It's a film keenly aware of global geopolitics, as well as the disruptive place Americans tend to occupy in travel stories, even if it eventually mishandles this dynamic. The outgoing Hanna hooks up with a Norwegian tourist, while the more reserved Liv tries to buy them drinks. When Liv's credit card is declined, the two friends are forced to improvise for a couple of weeks.

With the assistance of a work-travel program, they're able to score a temporary job, albeit one of the less-desired ones given their late application: a bar in the middle of nowhere called The Royal Hotel, where they're set to replace a pair of young English women passing through. The hesitant Liv isn't too keen to stick around, given their shoddy lodging space above the bar itself, but Hanna reminds her that they've been seeking adventure. This could be exactly what they've been looking for.

Their new boss, Billy (Hugo Weaving), is rough around the edges and a heavy drinker, but he guides the pair through the bar's ins and outs with military efficiency. His girlfriend, Carol (Burarra and Serbian actor Ursula Yovich), an Aboriginal woman and the bar's head cook, provides the only hints of warmth and feminine presence they can feel for miles around, except for one older bar patron who laughs heartily at the men's demeaning jokes. However, Carol is often too preoccupied with kitchen work (and with managing Billy's drunken outbursts) to offer much comfort.

The patrons are mostly gruff, uncouth men with their own sense of routine and camaraderie as local miners. Since they comprise the majority of Billy's customer base, he's willing to let the odd condescending or sexist comment slide if it means a steadier income. There's immediate, silent friction at the Royal between the American newcomers and the embedded Aussie crowd — though at least some of it is cultural, like their respective discomfort and ease with the word "cunt" — and while it starts out routine and familiar, it begins to slowly cascade. Things start to seem out of place. Before long, Green begins employing full-on genre flourishes to tell her story, transforming The Royal Hotel into one of the year's most effective thrillers.

Kitty Green borrows the language of horror and thriller films.

Despite the flaws in its perspective, The Royal Hotel is far from didactic in the way it creates and evolves compelling character dynamics. There's a reciprocity to each moment of care and hostility, and a sense of genuine community that Liv and Hanna stumble into. The bar's frequent customers include the quiet, mysterious Dolly (Daniel Henshall); the helpful and sensitive Teeth (James Frecheville); and the rowdy but inviting Matty (Toby Wallace); their interactions with the two women, and with their fellow patrons, help us form a base of understanding of who these people are, and the place in which Liv and Hanna find themselves.

After a few days, as the young Americans spend time with a handful of local Aussie guys, the prospect of romance arises, or at the very least the prospect of sexual encounters. However, in the dim confines of the Hotel's living quarters, these possibilities rest on a knife's edge. A signal misread or ignored, coupled with fragile and volatile egos, could so easily make things nasty. The mere shapes of these men — from their silhouettes, to their imposing, inebriated shuffles across darkened hallways — becomes instantly terrifying.

Of course, things look a little different in the sunlight, but as the days go by, and as Liv and Hanna become more acquainted with men like Dolly and Matty, the film's aesthetic and narrative perspective begins to morph in unsettling ways, becoming more intimate and claustrophobic. It increasingly makes Hanna its sole protagonist, severing her POV from that of Liv's in a manner that both causes friction between the two friends and isolates them from one another during vulnerable moments, especially as Liv gets increasingly caught up in the allure of a liberating foreign adventure.

At the drop of a hat, simple bar conversations become imbued with razor-wire tension, perfectly embodying the notion that in women's lives, there's a thin line between a road trip movie and a horror film.

The Royal Hotel is a step up from The Assistant.

Ursula Yovich and Hugo Weaving in "The Royal Hotel."

Green's last two movies make for an intriguing back-to-back case study. The Assistant , which casts Garner similarly in the role of an observer, has its protagonist react to the odd and uncomfortable environment created in the office of a powerful film executive (implied to be a Harvey Weinstein type, though he never appears on screen).

It's effective on occasion, especially when Garner's eponymous assistant comes face to face with a ruthless, borderline sociopathic HR head played by Matthew MacFadyen. But for the most part, it seeks to capture the way working in this helpless environment infects one woman's daily routine. At times, it's molded in the vein of filmmaker Chantal Akerman, and her observational masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles — the appearance and technique of which The Assistant borrows heavily, though it pales in comparison to its inspiration.

Where The Assistant plays like a mere impression of Akerman, The Royal Hotel is much more spiritually in line with Jeanne Dielman , whether by accident or intent. Green's latest couldn't be more different from Akerman's 1975 feminist landmark in style or subject matter — Akerman observes her character quietly moving through her own kitchen at a distance; Green frequently makes the edges of the frame close in on Hanna in a foreign locale — but they're strikingly similar in spirit, capturing the slow and volatile buildup of impositions and indignities that eventually boil over into striking violence. The Assistant , on the other hand, simmers at a constant temperature.

However, The Royal Hotel is also marred by an over-eagerness to wrap things up in a neat, cathartic bow that ends up constricting it. Its conclusion doesn't feel entirely befitting of the nuance and substance it captures prior. Like Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman , it's another example of a film whose desire for cinematic justice pushes it to a strange and blinkered place , where its version of feminism transforms from a bristling portrayal of the contours of gendered violence to a "Fuck, yeah!" fist pump. The too-tidy ending sweeps any lingering discomforts under the rug, in favor of a distinctly white feminist vision of retribution.

While the movie's climactic images are incendiary in nature (and are best left unspoiled), they fail to be truly provocative. The only challenge The Royal Hotel presents by the end is regressive in nature; where it seeks to symbolically dismantle one power structure, it simultaneously upholds and embodies another: that of Western colonialism. While it attempts to get around this by conveniently removing its Aboriginal characters from its purview, simply ignoring its own racial implications doesn't mean they cease to exist. Not when the ripple effects of Liv and Hanna’s actions have direct consequences for Carol’s ongoing plight at the hands of white men — a victimhood that isn't treated as worthy of the same rigorous cinematic inquiry as theirs. Which is a shame, considering the fine-tuned artistry at play for about 90% of the preceding film.

The result, despite Green's deft tonal control and masterful genre transformations, is a victory that rings hollow at a moment when artistic precision matters most.

The Royal Hotel is now in theaters .

UPDATE: Oct. 5, 2023, 2:30 p.m. EDT The Royal Hotel was reviewed out of the Toronto Film Festival. This review has been rerun for its theatrical release.

Topics Film

Siddhant Adlakha is a film critic and entertainment journalist originally from Mumbai. He currently resides in New York, and is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle.

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‘The Royal Hotel’ Review: Julia Garner Fends Off a Town Full of Horny Miners in Kitty Green’s Harrowing Outback Thriller

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival. Neon releases the film in theaters on Friday, October 6.

The good news is that Garner’s character isn’t alone; Hanna’s on an open-ended vacation with her friend Liv (Jessica Henwick) when the two run out of money on a party boat in Sydney and decide to sign up for the last Work & Travel job available. The bad news is that Liv is about to be Hanna’s only ally for a few hundred miles in any direction, and she tends to become more of a liability than a safety net after a few drinks. The lady at the job office warns these wayward American girls that they might have to put up with some male attention, but that would be like the owner of the Overlook Hotel warning Wendy Torrance that she might have to put up with a mild case of writer’s block.

And so the stage is set for Green to stage another masterfully constructed pressure cooker about the perils of being a woman on planet Earth, this one much pulpier and more visceral than “The Assistant” (which was a veritable chamber piece), but no less exacting in how it conveys the constant threat assessment required for a girl in Hanna’s situation to make it safely through the night. By the end of her first shift behind the bar at The Royal Hotel, an elaborate matrix of lust, expectation, and entitlement has already been established between Hanna and some of the bar’s regulars. By the end of her second week there, every beer she’s asked to get a particularly terrifying miner — and every smile that she’s expected to serve along with it — has become as suspenseful as watching a truck full of nitroglycerine make a hairpin turn in “The Wages of Fear.”

Played by an abandoned pub in a town that has a population of 29 people, The Royal Hotel itself is more dilapidated than foreboding, and while its alcoholic proprietor might burst in on the girls when they’re trying to use the broken showers next to the bedrooms above the bar, Billy (an excellent Hugo Weaving) seems more like a nuisance than a threat. You get the sense that The Royal Hotel didn’t feel like an ironic name for this dump when Billy’s grandfather opened it all those years ago, but the bar — much like its begrimed current owner — now seems like the punchline of a cruel joke. Given his financial situation, Billy can’t even afford to ban patrons from the bar, which removes one of the only guardrails protecting Hanna and Liv from the clientele.

Besides, some of the local men seem harmless enough, even if they’re all circling the girls like hungry sharks with the scent of blood in their noses. Matty (“Babyteeth” breakout Toby Wallace, continuing to impress) is the nicest of the bunch, or at least the cutest. Sure, he’s an oaf like all the rest, but he loves Kylie Minogue and went to school for meteorology so who knows. There’s certainly more potential there than there is with Teeth (“Animal Kingdom” star James Frecheville), the resident “nice guy” who assumes that if he sits at the bar for long enough that one of the girls will belong to them. And Dolly (played by “The Babadook” actor Daniel Henshall), well he’s obviously the most dangerous of them all from the first time you see him.

By the time the movie is half-over we can already feel how the temperature changes when Carol or Billy enters the room, even if the mood only changes by a degree or two. When two out-of-towners sidle up to the bar looking for some champagne, a chill runs down your spine because you know they’re not supposed to be there.

Few movies have ever so palpably or intricately conveyed the violent pall of male attention, and the men here are that much scarier because not even they seem to know what they’re capable of doing, or what their endgame might be. The threat level is always in flux, which prevents this broadly familiar thriller from ever feeling as if it’s on rails. The movie is as fluid as a drunken night out (Henwick, who’s quickly becoming one of our most exciting young actresses, deserves all the credit in the world for bringing raw truth to Liv’s bad choices), and while The Royal Hotel might be dying before our eyes, Green ensures that the place still has a life of its own.

The more frightening things get, the more they tip into Western territory. That dynamic climaxes with an image so nakedly Fordian that you can feel Green’s film exploding out of the bar and straight into the stuff of myth. The specifics of Hanna and Liv’s situation might be strange and uncommonly nuanced, but this is a tale as old as time. The only thing these girls have the power to change is who gets to tell it; it’s a power that Garner’s character in “The Assistant” sorely lacked, and one that Green leverages here — in a far deadlier but more pliable environment — with cathartic glee.

“The Royal Hotel” premiered at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival. NEON will release it in theaters later this year.

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The Royal Hotel Reviews

The discomforting nature of its delivery may divide certain audiences, but the observations it makes in regards to male behaviour is as powerful as it is maddening to those who recall similar experiences.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 19, 2024

with two narrative features under her belt, both as striking and as sharp as a shattered whisky bottle, Green is a filmmaker one should take notice of...a thriller where respect is more scarce than water in the drought-ridden town

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 4, 2024

While cleverly giving the story a crowd-pleasing finale, Aussie director and co-writer Kitty Green’s take just never quite engenders the same sense of voyeurism – or nausea – that made the documentary Hotel Coolgardie such unforgettable viewing.

Full Review | Apr 28, 2024

While not a complex story, it is developed with Kitty Green's firm hand, who draws a persuasive atmosphere from the main setting... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 19, 2024

Kitty Green successfully directs a thriller that confuses and surprises, is suffocating as well as refreshing, and has a very outstanding performance by Julia Garner. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 12, 2024

The Royal Hotel constantly flirts with the 'rape and revenge' genre but never crosses that line. And that is quite fortuitous. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 12, 2024

This small, isolated society is delicately balanced on the cliff edge of a canyon of chaos. When it finally falls off, it is not unexpected, but, even so, the final events are not what I was expecting.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Jan 27, 2024

As a whole, the film feels a bit undercooked, but even if the energy is heightened, scenes remain grounded in edgy realism.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 16, 2024

It's a thriller about female safety and empowerment.

Full Review | Original Score: 3 stars | Dec 29, 2023

A movie which marinates in misogynist threat like many a thriller, but without the usual familiar genre touchstones.

Full Review | Dec 26, 2023

We get a rather disconcertingly janky ending which feels like a ninety-minute non-sequitur, especially after hinting at something tangible, some reveal or purpose.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Dec 10, 2023

‘…as dingy and off-putting at the building itself, The Royal Hotel is no-one’s favourite film, but it does what The Assistant does, by crystallising a female POV that’s too often been the starting point for a narrative about male heroism or revenge….’

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 7, 2023

While it may not conclude on the strongest note, Green creates an environment that gets more physically and psychologically perilous from our protagonists while steadily getting more unnerving for us.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 6, 2023

It's no Wake in Fright, but that's hardly a criticism.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 28, 2023

The balance between realism and abstraction isn’t maintained quite until the end, which is effective in its way, but less than a fully convincing resolution to what has come before.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 27, 2023

It is the women’s slow disintegration from with-it to without-a-clue that draws the clinical focus of filmmaker Kitty Green (The Assistant), and results in a solid number of powerfully uneasy scenes.

The Royal Hotel, for the most part, is a gripping, tense Thriller that shines when exploring the dynamics of its two flawed characters and their response to their predicament.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 25, 2023

Like pickled eggs and breakfast schooners, the ethos of hard-core drinking tends to be an acquired taste.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 24, 2023

A fantastic, gut-churning chiller that, like Wake in Fright and Long Weekend before it, pierces the Australian national identity with the ferocity of a pick in ice.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 24, 2023

Strong start, great build-up, weak finish. That’s the most concise and accurate way to describe The Royal Hotel, the latest in a long stretch of Australian films to demonstrate the importance of having a compelling third act by essentially not having one.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 23, 2023