**½/****
starring Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, James Frecheville, Hugo Weaving
written by Kitty Green & Oscar Redding
directed by Kitty Green
by Walter Chaw Aussie hyphenate Kitty Green’s follow-up to her superlative office horror The Assistant is The Royal Hotel, a lighter, distaff version of Wake in Fright in which two college girls looking for a little adventure but out of money find themselves in the Outback tending bar to a bunch of despicable degenerates. Hanna (Julia Garner) is the cautious one and Liv (Jessica Henwick) is the broken one, leading to a few uncomfortable scenes where Liv gets fall-down drunk while surrounded by a bunch of men who would most assuredly like to rape and murder her. Maybe not in the bright light of day, but a few dozen pints later all’s fair in love and the poor decisions most of us somehow survive. For the record, I liked Hanna very much and loathed Liv, which is evidence of not only a profound empathy gap in me that stops me from caring about people who, by their damage, end up damaging those who’ve made themselves responsible for them, but also a script (by Green and Oscar Redding) that leans perhaps too heavily on the horror-movie dichotomy of good girl/party girl. What works so well about Wake in Fright is how its hero is both a respectable doctor and a drunken gambling addict with a sadistic streak. You hate him, but you hate everyone else a tiny bit more. Still, when he puts a gun to his temple, you hope he doesn’t miss. Imagine the film now with a friend for the hero who is fully equipped with a working human warning system that no one will heed. It’s distracting; it becomes a different movie when there’s someone in it making sense.
The bar Hanna and Liv are trapped in is owned by dangerous alcoholic Billy (Hugo Weaving) and his partner Carol (Rusula Yovich). He sits at the bar and drinks while she stays in the back and cooks french fries. Occasionally, he throws out patrons for getting too rowdy, and with slightly more frequency, Carol comes out to yell at him for not paying the bills and disappointing his dead father. They are also broad types, and there’s not a lot of mystery as to how our sympathies will fall. That goes for the clients, too, a rogue’s gallery led with quiet menace by a creeper called Dolly (Daniel Henshall) who is so obviously a psychopath that when Liv tries to tell Hanna, she’s called a wet blanket for not “giving him a chance.” You want to punch her in the face on Hanna’s behalf. This is more of a problem because Hanna, as smart and perceptive as she is, is entirely loyal to this person who will get them into situations Hanna would not get into on her own. Do people enter into ill-advised friendships with self-destructive individuals? Sure. But The Royal Hotel isn’t really about Hanna’s bad choices. Instead, it’s about her good choices, all the events of the film designed to lead to her moment of heroism: saving herself and her death-wish buddy from harm rather than bear witness to their mutual destruction. The choices movies like this have at the beginning is to be a horror film that makes you feel bad or a horror film that makes you feel good: a cautionary tale or a cathartic one. I guess on the scale of things, I prefer the Wolf Creeks to the Royal Hotels.
The film, in other words, has no interest in punishing these young women for their lack of planning and rash remedies to such. It’s not interested in the circumstances that might lead to desperate and pathetic social situations like the one depicted here (the privation, violence, substance abuse, and misogyny), nor is it interested in portraying these locals as anything other than hicksploitation ghouls with nothing much, much less good, ever troubling their pea brains. Credit for not wasting time on too much sad backstory for the girls; credit, too, for a collection of loathsome male behaviours that are suitably horrifying–if, again, blatant enough that it’s tough to manufacture much sympathy for our hero’s continued engagement with them. I will say I enjoyed Garner’s performance. She portrays fear well and intelligence naturally. I was knocked flat by the underplayed look on her face when a man she thought was an ally gets too drunk and calls her by the terrible name the other bar patrons have started calling her. A standoff between Hanna and Dolly one night at last call is so tense, so perfectly played (and indeed so unsettling), that had the rest of the film been these quiet showdowns between rabid predators and the folks whose birthright it is to be either hunted by them or keep them at bay without further provoking them, The Royal Hotel might’ve proved a genuinely unusual, even useful, piece. As it is, it’s a fair example of a familiar exercise: a horror film that turns into a victory parade. I’ll soon forget its title and begin to conflate it with other movies. I’m looking forward to Garner’s next time at bat, though. She has a pretty mean swing, even if her on-base average could use some work.
