The two main characters in The Royal Hotel—young women abroad who take bartending jobs at a run-down resort in the Australian outback after they’ve run out of traveling funds—make so many ill-advised choices that you begin to wonder if director Kitty Green, who wrote the film with Oscar Redding, is conducting some sort of feminist litmus test. How much can we take before we find ourselves blaming them for their predicament, rather than the predatory men (and, in some cases, enabling women) around them? Of course that would be a mistake, which the movie eventually makes clear, as the innuendo and leering glances from the miners who frequent the hotel bar eventually escalate into increasingly upsetting interactions. Despite that trajectory, The Royal Hotel never settles into a consistent register; it dabbles, at turns, in drama, thriller, and horror territory, but fails to establishes its own clear identity. Green had a firmer sense of intent in her feature debut, The Assistant, which employed a spartan claustrophobia to evoke the experience of working for a Harvey Weinstein-like abuser. The Assistant star Julia Garner returns here as one of the travelers, alongside Jessica Henwick, yet neither character registers much beyond their harrowing situation.
(11/8/2023)
