The Royal Hotel

2023, Kitty Green, Australia/UK/USA

An adaptation of Pete Gleeson’s devastating 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie, Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel maintains a throughline that has underpinned decades of harrowing films set in her native Australia. The most terrifying thing in the Outback isn’t the snakes or the spiders or the desolate landscape… it’s the Aussies.

The film stars Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick as two young American women (they were Finnish in the doco) who end up bartending in a remote Western Australian mining town. While there, they are confronted with the unrelenting inappropriate behaviour of the locals, including Billy the bartender (played by Hugo Weaving). 

Green had previously worked with Garner in the excellent The Assistant, another depiction of a professional setting (in that case Hollywood) in which the misogyny is so endemic that it becomes indistinguishable from the air the employees breathe. Here though, with the addition of psychological thriller elements, Green allows her characters to push back against their workplace harassment.

“The Royal Hotel simmers with the heat of oppressive testosterone at a pub in the Australian Outback. That is, until it boils over with cathartic female rage.”—Hanna Flint, London Evening Standard