The Royal Hotel

American best friends Hanna and Liv are backpacking around Australia, but when they run out of cash, they are forced to take a temporary job in a bar out in a remote Outback mining town. Isolated in the middle of nowhere, and surrounded by lonely and aggressive miners, they find themselves trapped in an unnerving situation that soon grows rapidly out of their control.

Two young woman, traveling abroad on a shoestring budget, running out of money because they’re partying so hard, and ending up stuck and working in a remote bar in the desolate ass-end of the world? Obviously, this looks and sounds like the start of a horror movie, but the only real horror here… is men.

The Royal Hotel was apparently inspired by a 2016 documentary called “Hotel Coolgardie” which explored the misogyny and harassment faced by twenty-something Finnish backpackers while they were working in an isolated bar in a mining town out in the Australian Outback. Royal Hotel dramatizes this whole idea very loosely, all in an attempt to be an examination of the dangerous misogyny that is rife in modern day society, all while set in an Australian Outback mining town.

So, yeah, American fuck-arounds Hanna and Liv are on holiday, claiming to be Canadian because “everyone loves Canadians.” Hanna is the more responsible of the pair, and it’s implied that Liv may have an issue with partying too hard, due to vague family issues back home, and it’s implied that this is both why they’re in Australia in the first place, and also why they have run out of money.

The temporary live-work job they take is at the titular Royal Hotel, a rundown and weather-beaten building in the middle of a midde-of-nowhere shithole of a town that is out in the kind of middle of nowhere that takes a train, a bus, and a very dusty car ride to get to. And because the ride back out again only comes rarely, once the pair are there, they’re there for a while. Also, because of their middle of nowhere status, the Royal Hotel is the only bar for miles. It’s a rough and occasionally charming place, but mostly it’s rude and ugly, kind of threatening, and often quickly violent. It’s run by a long-time drunken asshole, and serves a clientele that’s mostly made up of the same, along with the addition of a several huge creeps. Immediately upon Hannah and Liv’s arrival, pretty much everyone there starts leering and making little comments, crude jokes, cutting insults, and awkward passes. They grope and guffaw. They lurk. They glower and stare.

It’s a stew of potential sexual assault and rape, and it’s coming to a boil.

Nothing like that actually happens, just fyi, we googled ahead while watching just to be sure, because who wants to watch that kind of shit? Not me. On the list of film’s I generally avoid sight-unseen, Rape Revenge films is one of them. But just to reiterate, nothing like that happens here, despite a few tense moments.

Still, there’s a constant feeling of tension, from the bad phone reception, the occasional broken glass, the random firecrackers, or the too-loud laughter from the clumps of men standing in the shadows, it’s nothing but tension. Despite the fact that Hannah and Liv are not the only women in town, it can certainly seem like they are, as they’re surrounded by walls of unwashed men looming over them every night.

So, it’s a very tense film.

The problem is… you’re well past the halfway point in this film before anything specific happens that you might call the actual start of the story’s conflict. I get the intent here… for women, just being out in the world, there’s a feeling of a constant threat from men, especially when the booze starts flowing, but this is also a movie, and it’s a good forty-five minutes before anything of note actually happens here, at least as far as actual conflict goes.

The story mostly focuses on the different ways these two young women react to finding themselves in this situation, and the way their relationship frays because of it. Liv dives headfirst into the men's hard-drinking lifestyle, while Hanna pretty much keeps her distance. Hannah is obviously wary of the drunks around her, and there’s plenty of indications that she’s seen her fair share of the dark side of alcoholism, so she spends most of her time dragging Liv out of the fire, and back into their shared frying pan. This starts to strain credulity after a while, because while, yeah, we’ve all known this kid (or have been this kid) at one point in our lives, Liv’s story never really solidifies the same way Hannah’s does. Instead, Liv just makes terrible decision after terrible decision, becoming more and more determinedly belligerent about putting herself directly into drunken-stupor-danger, and as a result, you begin to wonder why Hannah and Liv are even really friends.

I do know one thing for sure, if I was Hannah? After all of this was over, I would not be Liv’s friend anymore.

Julia Garner plays Hanna, and Jessica Henwick plays Liv, and they’re both very talented, so they lend a lot of believable weight to their performances, but despite this, and despite the film’s constant tension, the movie ends up being too timid, it’s all threat and no delivery.

Like I said, I pretty much have no interest in rape revenge stories, or anything that might possibly use rape or sexual assault as a plot point, but while the events of the film are threatening and uncomfortable, and even sometimes violent, nothing really happens. I mean, yes, stuff happens, and it’s all shitty, and Hannah and Liv definitely needed to get out of there… still, nothing happens in this film that was any worse than what goes on at tons of bars, especially the more irresponsible ones that allow friends and regulars to stay after closing and keep drinking. It’s out of control, yes, and these people all have problems, definitely, but nothing happens beyond some bad shitty drunken decisions made by some bad shitty drunken regulars.

And also like I said, the problem is… this a movie, you’re telling a story here, so not only do things need to happen, but they all need to come to a head. You have to deliver on the tension that you’ve created, you need a climax, it’s an essential part of the story. Hannah and Liv definitely needed some kind of resolution as characters, or something to indicate what affect the events of the film had on them, and how the way they each reacted to these events was going to affect the future of their relationship, but we don’t get any of that. The film is too chickenshit to really dig into it. It’s too chickenshit to dig into anything that happens here.

Instead, the big climax is just a handful of way-too-drunk people melting down after bar close, and doing things they’ll feel like an asshole about the next morning, if they even fully remember it, and it’s implied that maybe things could’ve been much, much worse… maybe… but still, those possibly much worse things don’t actually happen, so again… basically nothing happens.

The big problem with all of this, besides it just ending up a generally unsatisfying story, is that the film takes what is otherwise a shitty night at the bar amongst its too-drunk-too-often regulars, and has Hannah and Liv then deliberately burn the whole place down. Worst of all, the film then ends almost immediately after, showing them walking away from the burning conflagration as if they were triumphant heroes, and not a pair of irresponsible young drunks who burned down a man’s livelihood, while he was out of town, because they were mad at some other guys, who were jerks to them, yes, but who otherwise only happen to drink at this particular bar.

The film very obviously wants to portray this as if the pair is excising a cancer from the town, but after watching the film, it’s more akin to something like, say… some guy gets mad that a woman doesn’t like him, so he calls her a bitch, which is a dick move, true, but in response, she then goes and burns down another guy’s business, and then struts around like she’s a hero. It’s like “Wait, wait… maybe that wasn’t an appropriate response?” You can say “Oh, but they’re cutting off the source for the loutish drunken behavior by removing the bar where it's all centered.” But are they? These people live in a town, a very small town, sure, but it obviously has a liquor store as well as a bar, and half the time in this film, these people are drinking outside, everywhere from a hole in the ground, to a parking lot.

And even worse, this ending paints our heroes as both dumb and reactionary, and only highlights how their own egregious personal issues are the actual problem here.

It’s not that Hannah and Liv should’ve been portrayed as saints, it’s that, if your message here is “men have a misogyny problem,” then you shouldn’t end the film with a pair of “hysterical girls” wildly escalating the situation, especially when it’s in a way that could conceivably land them both in an Austrailian jail for arson at the very least (which is also pretty much the only crime that actually occurs in this movie), especially when they could’ve just left town, with their pay in their pockets.

But all that aside, in a nutshell, this is the kind of the film that shouldn’t leave you with the takeaway that “everybody here sucks.”

Royal Hotel is a film that feels like it not only isn’t sure what it’s trying to say, it doesn’t know how to go about saying it, or even worse, it lacks the guts to do so. It feels more like this film really believed it was edgy and hardcore, that it actually had something to say, but was never really challenged on that while it was busy wrapping itself up in its indie cred, and in it’s distribution by Neon. And to be fair, the tension in this film is very well done, this is often a frightening movie, but it goes nowhere. In the end, it feels like the product of too many pats on the back, and not enough notes for script rewrites.

Because, after watching the film, the reality is… Royal Hotel is just cheap exploitive fluff. No meat, no blood, and definitely no meaning. It’s all smoke and no fire, except at the end, which felt wrong, or at least, aimed at the wrong target. Ultimately, this was a very unsatisfying and frustrating experience.

Hard pass.