After running out of money while backpacking in a tiny, male-dominated town in the Australian outback, two friends resort to a working holiday at the Royal Hotel. When the locals behavior starts crossing the line, the girls find themselves trapped in an unnerving situation that grows rapidly out of their control.
더 로열 호텔, 皇家酒店, מלון רויאל, Hotel Royal, Отель «Рояль», Karališkasis viešbutis, Готель «Роял», Le Royal Hôtel, ロイヤルホテル, เดอะรอยัลโฮเต็ล
USA
Telluride Film Festival
Canada
Toronto International Film Festival
UK
BFI London Film Festival
Australia
Adelaide Film Festival
Poland
Canada
USAR
Ireland16
UK18
Greece
Germany16
Spain
Japan
USAR
Australia
Canada
Germany
Greece
Ireland
Japan
Poland
Spain
UK
USA
Following 2019’s deeply unnerving “The Assistant” with another razor-sharp Julia Garner collaboration, Australian filmmaker Kitty Green has decided to strand her favorite actress in one of the few places on Earth more dangerous for a young woman than Harvey Weinstein’s production office: A shithole bar on the border of an ultra-remote mining town so deep within the Australian outback that no one there has even heard of the #MeToo movement. Welcome to “The Royal Hotel.”
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.…
A razor’s edge thriller about two women trying to survive the horrors of…existing? Jessica Henwick is entrancing, Julia Garner is a lit fuse. Go see it.
After really admiring the deadening, anxiety-inducing monotony of Green's last film The Assistant, which very effectively managed to locate the infuriating powerlessness at the intersection of precarious labor and gendered abuse in film industry offices I went into this one pretty excited to see her reteam with Garner to riff on work travel programs and service work which both have their fair share of predatory behavior. And I think a lot of it is fairly well-observed here (if maybe a little eagerly underlined), dropping the girls into a grimy, remote Australian mining town dive pub and slowly watching their financial desperation take precedent over their comfort limits and willingness to entertain "male attention" as the casual leering, sexist jokes/attitudes and…
Kitty Green 0/2. The thudding one-note obviousness robs it of any ounce of tension, and that last shot is out of an entirely different (somehow worse) movie. Henwick and Garner innocent though.
Much too preoccupied with its own veneer of simplicity to ever bother telling a complete story with complete characters. The film’s supposed bread and butter is its repetitive presentation of the constant, everyday indignities women face, particularly in the kind of environment depicted — problem is, presentation only takes you so far when there are no other courses coming afterward. I stress that this relatively restrained approach makes thematic sense and is admirable in theory, and possibly would be acceptable in this case were the sameness of the backdrop actually contrasted against our main characters’ complexities. It’s tougher when the leads are afforded little interiority or motivations separate from their relation to said backdrop or to very obvious metaphors. Take…
