An Australian Vacation Takes a Weird Turn in ‘The Royal Hotel’

“She’s laughing. I think she’s laughing.”

Early on in Kitty Green’s deeply unnerving The Royal Hotel, one of the two travelers at the center of this thriller hears a sound in the distance. She convinces herself it’s not a scream—but it’s obvious from her tone that she’s unsure.

Green’s feature, which hit the Toronto International Film Festival after a premiere at Telluride, lives in the uncertainty of this distinction. In the remote Australian pub where the story takes place, laughter and wails are almost interchangeable. That tension makes the film excruciating but exciting; like the characters, the viewer has to try to suss out what is a danger and what is just a good time.

The Royal Hotel, written by Green and Oscar Redding, reunites Green with Julia Garner, the star of her earlier film, The Assistant—a very different but also uncomfortable watch. Here Garner plays Hanna, an American college grad partying through Australia with her friend Liv, portrayed by Glass Onion’s Jessica Henwick.

When the film opens, they’re in Sydney clubbing on a boat in the middle of the day. Hanna is making out with a hot Norwegian (Herbert Nordrum of The Worst Person in the World), and Liv is grabbing beers when her credit card is declined. Out of money, they get a gig through a work travel agency at a bar in a dusty, faraway mining town.

The Royal is run by a gruff alcoholic named Billy (Hugo Weaving) and the terse but perceptive Carol (Ursula Yovich), his partner who serves as cook. Liv and Hanna arrive to find they are replacing two British girls who embraced the Royal’s style of drunken revelry—and while Hanna is immediately skeptical, Liv sees the opportunity as an adventure to take before continuing their vacation.

Green and Redding’s script is deliberately obscure about Liv and Hanna’s lives back home. They are clearly running away from something—Hanna was a business and marketing major, yet somehow has no money—but they choose not to discuss it. Instead, we get a picture of their relationship from the way they respond to the challenges the Royal presents.

In Sydney, Liv is the one rebuking male attention, while Hanna embraces it,. But as soon as they get to this new landscape, Hanna, out of her comfort zone, is more timid. As bartenders they are expected to smile and roll with the constant innuendo directed their way by the usually wasted patrons, who see them not just as servers but potential sexual partners in a land largely devoid of women.

Violence in these interactions is a possibility, but not necessarily a given, which is one of the reasons Green’s narrative is so unsettling. Garner, brilliant as a disassociating employee of a Weinstein-type figure in The Assistant, here contorts herself into a state of constant fear with moments of release. She allows herself a flirtation with a regular named Matty (Toby Wallace), who seems like a sweet enough guy when he’s jamming out to Kylie Minogue in his car, but also displays hints of aggression.

The longer they spend at the Royal, the more Liv begins to both drink and excuse the behavior of the men surrounding her. Hanna, in turn, becomes more protective, and you can see hints of a pattern that has been repeated in their relationship. Henwick plays Liv as charming if irresponsible, while Garner’s Hanna is clearly down for a good time, but someone who likes to be in control of her faculties and her situation.

Green, Australian herself, films the barren world around the bar with an eye towards both its beauty and its brutality. Similarly, no one person in the film is easily defined. Weaving’s Billy, although callous and messy, is perhaps not ill-intentioned, dealing with his own demons. These other men are maybe lonely souls or potential rapists. Green deals in the unexplicit, and those questions are the engine of the film.

Because of that, the film’s ending is perhaps a little pat for what has preceded it— but it’s what we can’t discern that lingers. Was that woman laughing or screaming? Green never wants us to know for sure, and that’s what gets under your skin.