Movie review: The Royal Hotel

Julia Garner plays the role of Canadian backpacker bartender Hanna, travelling with her fun-loving best friend Liv (Jessica Henwick) in The Royal Hotel.

The Royal Hotel (R, 91 mins) Streaming for rent on Academy, AroVision and Neon; screening on Sky TV’s Rialto

Directed by Kitty Green

Reviewed by Jen Shieff

The Royal Hotel of the title is a long way away from anything royal: it’s an isolated almost derelict building in a vast treeless landscape in outback Australia. Julia Garner plays the role of Canadian backpacker bartender Hanna, travelling with her fun-loving best friend Liv (Jessica Henwick). The pair run out of money in Sydney and take to the road, a long and dusty one, to work in the hotel, serving miners, unaware of how they drink to excess and behave appallingly.

Hanna is a more vulnerable character than any previously played by Julia Garner: she was Ruth in Ozark (2017-2022), Anna Delvey in the series Inventing Anna (2022), but here she’s almost as hunted and cornered as she was as Jane in The Assistant (2019), also directed by Kitty Green. Always the smart but bottled up underdog, rarely smiling, Garner is convincing, whatever her role.

Green told the 2023 San Sebastian film festival she intended The Royal Hotel would be a film that would spark discussion about drinking culture, and it certainly will do that.

Stanley Kubrick said of his psychological horror The Shining (1980) that it enabled him to show that there’s an evil side to the human personality, something inherently wrong with it. He said horror stories let us see the dark side without having to confront it directly.

Remote locations, such as The Shining’s Overlook Hotel and the Royal Hotel, are ideal settings for dark side dramas involving people who’ve chosen to step outside society. The Royal Hotel is the more subtle of the two films, with fewer horror elements, but all the same, apparently good times at the local swimming hole, the only place where water is evident, thinly mask something menacing inside Matty (Toby Wallace), one of the miners who’ve been sweltering in the dry for far too long. What’s really going on with him? Is he an exception to the perpetually nasty undercurrent in the Royal Hotel’s bar, or just another misogynist like creepy Dolly (Daniel Henshall)?

Billy (Hugo Weaving), the bad-tempered alcoholic owner of the Royal Hotel, a mean man, out of control of himself and his cash register, rejects the suggestions made by long-suffering Carol (Ursula Yovich), whose kindness to Hanna is a light in the dark. All through the various goings on, Liv is oblivious, only wanting to party, telling Hanna to get over her suspicions.

“You could try smiling once in a while,” Billy tells Hanna, and we can see his point of view, sort of.

Well scripted by Green in collaboration with Oscar Redding, the story is believable, which is unsurprising since it was inspired by the Pete Gleeson documentary Hotel Coolgardie (2016), which chronicles the real-life story of two Finnish backpackers, Lina and Steph, who also faced inhumane treatment while working as bartenders in a mining town.

Much more than recommended viewing for anyone who needs encouragement to dry out, The Royal Hotel is a well told, if slightly chilling yarn, rough justice providing a satisfying ending.

★★★