Review: Check into ‘The Royal Hotel’ for well-wrought dread that’s all too familiar to women

The walls are scabbed. The strip lighting is dingy. The decor is cheap: liquor bottles and dead snakes pickled in jars. Kitty Green’s queasily gripping “The Royal Hotel” is set in a location neither regal nor much of a hotel.

But if the grandiose name of this crummy dive — an isolated outback bar catering to the scattered, largely male regional mining community — has ever attracted so much as an ironic comment, it was a long time ago and no one can be bothered to make that joke anymore. Perhaps irony, like water for the swimming pool, is a resource that dries up seasonally in these parts, leaving only a dust bowl of surly resentment and some tatty deckchairs behind.

Green’s expertly calibrated movie takes place in surroundings we rarely see outside the grislier class of slasher movie, one that seems built purely to have things go on in it that no one will ever care to recall. Certainly, it’s a place that two nice young American women (who know enough about the reputation of American tourists to claim to be Canadian) partying away an Australian vacation, would never ordinarily wash up in. But best friends Liv (Jessica Henwick) and Hanna (Green’s “The Assistant” star Julia Garner) experience a sudden shortage of funds that forces them off the Sydney harbor party-boat circuit and into the only jobs available on a work-travel program. Which is how they find themselves stumbling off the twice-weekly bus to the derrière of nowhere, squinting at a dirt track that only seems to lead to more dirt.

They’re brought to the bar by Carol (Ursula Yovich), the no-nonsense Indigenous cook who is the only person to exert any influence on bar owner Billy (Hugo Weaving), who’s as fond of a drink as he is of the casual deployment of the C-word. Liv and Hanna have been drafted (“Fresh Meat” reads a scrawled sign outside) to replace two British girls who, on their last night, get falling-off-the-bar, spilling-out-of-their-tube-tops drunk.

“That’ll be us in a few weeks,” remarks Liv dryly, but the very presence of these other women does quell some of the new arrivals’ fears. Sure, the clientele is rowdy, but if those girls survived — and even seemed to wildly enjoy — their stint, why can’t Liv and Hanna? A wickedly sharp taxonomy of all the different types of aggression that men too long in only one another’s company can visit on women, “The Royal Hotel” is an exposé of the kind of false sisterhood that plays women’s choices against each other. These women were all right with being treated like this, so if you’re not, that’s on you.

A scene from the movie “The Royal Hotel.”

(See-Saw Films)

It’s a rift that Green works cleverly into the relationship between Liv and Hanna, with Hanna ready to flee from the get-go, while Liv wants to stick it out, minimizing or downplaying the potential threat with the faintest of “chill out” eye-rolls. Initially, she prevails, so when the Brits leave in a haze of smashed bottles and drunken sex, Liv and Hanna have to face the next night without them absorbing any of the “male attention” they’d been warned about back in Sydney.

Gradually the men of the Royal Hotel come into focus as individuals, in such a way that disgruntled mens’ rights activists should rejoice: Far from flattening all the male characters into one malevolent archetype, Green shows just what an excitingly varied spectrum of toxicity exists in masculine behavior. From a general chorus of barflies and leering regulars who apparently derive pleasure from the thought of shocking a pretty girl with a dirty joke, there emerges cheerful, cheeky Matty (Toby Wallace); a slow-witted, scarred miner known only as Teeth (“Animal Kingdom’s” James Frecheville); and the indefinably creepy Dolly (another skin-crawlingly sinister turn from Daniel Henshall of “Snowtown” infamy), who just wants Hanna to smile a bit more.

Although inspired by Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary “Hotel Coolgardie,” “The Royal Hotel” is a more genre-inflected drama than the forensic dissection of #MeToo complicity that was “The Assistant.” But it is similarly single-minded, deriving much of its pressure-cooker tension from the precise re-creation of situations in which we, as spectators, catch ourselves judging Liv and Hanna’s actions. When the two of them clamber down into the dry pool basin for a box-wine picnic; when Liv gets sloppy drunk on her birthday; when Hanna, shocked sober by the sound of Dolly’s footsteps outside, turns the flimsy lock in fright — every nerve screams: Don’t you know not to get yourself into something you can’t easily get out of?

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But we are watching a movie. Hanna and Liv are not. And each interaction is, for them, a strange negotiation between wanting to be safe and the almost equally powerful desire to be cool, to be chill, to not be a drag. Women get blamed for being uptight right until something irrevocably awful happens, at which point they’re to blame for being blind.

“The Royal Hotel” moves in a straight line, but does play a little with this ambiguity. Indeed, there are several other versions of this deceptively smart film that, taking the exact same events from the perspective of Teeth, or Billy or Torsten (Herbert Nordrum), the dopey Scando tourist Hanna kissed in Sydney who shows up as a hilariously ineffectual rescuer, would simply play out as some version of “the time those American girls who didn’t know how to have a good time came out here and just couldn’t handle it.”

So it goes when the dominant culture is one that regards predatory masculinity as a fact of life, as ungovernable and unalterable as the weather, and puts it on women to constantly be checking the skies to judge whether it’s safe to leave the house. It’s all so horribly familiar — even for those who have never traveled, never tended bar, and never found themselves the only female in a roomful of drunken, lonely men. The central terror of Green’s ferociously tense, intelligent movie is the terror of recognition.