In Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel, Liv (Jessica Henwick) and Hanna (Julia Garner) are two modern American young women fulfilling their wanderlusty travel dreams with a backpacking trip to Australia. Using a work to travel agency, the two land a somewhat questionable gig bartending in an extremely remote mining town. Aside from the owner’s wife and the party girl Brits who Liv and Hanna are replacing, the duo are the only women in sight.
Much like Kitty Green’s previous film, The Assistant, Royal Hotel is fixated upon the gradient nature of violence toward women. Green is a master at capturing the boundaries that can be crossed without touch or even explicit suggestion. She easily and effectively presents the slippery social contradiction that exists between a woman’s lifelong practice of building a bullshit (and/or danger) detector, and a man’s subsequent mastery of the line-toeing scripts and gestures required to allow them to immediately insist they were unserious or not a threat if called out.
Hanna and Liv’s boundaries, limits, and vulnerabilities are mapped out night after night by a group of drunk men who have each other’s backs. Soon, the jokes and flirtatious over-familiarity turn into footsteps outside of the girls’ rooms in the night, and the ushering of too-drunk girls into the backs of cars.
Liv seems less aware of the dangers of the space than Hanna. It’s a frustrating dynamic to watch, not as much because of Liv’s occasional dismissive brushing off of Hanna’s fears, but because Hanna has to worry in the first place. What would our world look like if Liv’s carefree attitude was warranted? What would it feel like to not have to learn hyper-vigilance?
The Royal Hotel is a nauseating pseudo-thriller, where the fear of fear itself is the horrific thread. The film’s guiding force is the terror that comes with constant vigilance and unrelenting, suspicious agitation. What is left unseen or undone onscreen doesn’t matter; we are fixated and frightened by what we all know might happen if we don’t get our friend out of the car in time, or if tell a man to fuck off on the wrong night.
Not much happens in The Royal Hotel in the traditional sense of a thriller, but this in and of itself feels like a commentary on a patriarchal reliance upon deeming the off-putting, intense, and threatening as “not that bad” or “close calls.” The fear that permeates The Royal Hotel suggests that these “close calls” about what could have been, and the vulnerability and terror these hard-to-describe interactions can evoke, can often be deeply felt traumas in and of themselves.
