Review: THE ROYAL HOTEL

Hannah and Liz, two American backpackers in Australia, run out of money and have to work locally. The only gig they are offered is as bar staff at a pub in the back of Bourke. It's a mining area so, the agent tells them, they will need to put up with a bit of male attention. From EDM parties on boats on Sydney Harbour they travel to the diesel and dust of nowhere where their instructions are brusque and without a lot of  form, meaning they'll need to learn as they go and it's easy to make a faux pas and cause brooding offence. But hey, it's money.

Then again, what's money? An extended sequence of the two women working at the bar is like something from the final act of Mother! But for the counter, the seethe of toxic masculinity on the other side would consume them and they get busy picking up every unwritten rule that presents itself. Between this and the lack of sympathy from their supposedly protective employers the night feels punitive and endless. Upstairs (and then on the counter of the bar) the two departing British packers show nothing but debauched hulls, regaining life only on the way out. This is only night one.

Kitty Green's fiction adaptation of the documentary Hotel Coolgardie does not repeat all the interpersonal atrocities of the source material. This time there is more examination of nuance, the ambiguity that transform a character from shy benignity to gorilla-like violence, from effortless charm to mounting threat. The interplay between the various locals and the women runs a gamut rather than describe a constant pushback. This prevents the film as a whole of falling into flat allegory. The differences between Hannah and Liz alone prevent that but the trouble taken to seek the vulnerability behind the brutality (where plausible: sometimes there's just brutality) keeps things edgy and realistic.

Aside from that there's not a lot of plot to The Royal Hotel. A few strands of narrative involving Liz and Hannah's various responses to the culture around them to open things up but the rest is a series of incidents within the hellish dark khaki brown interior of the pub sessions. Then again, the plot is best served by sparseness; it's the issue more than the fable of it that matters here. The scene of their first night serving is epic and interminable but it shows exhaustion without being exhausting. This is because it reveals fascinating truths about a culture of men forced by lucrative but agonising work to ease the toll on their nerves through a deteriorating restraint and galloping sense of licence.

Jessica Herwick shows the most flamboyant chops as the more outgoing Liz, frequently troubling in her proximity to ugly danger. Julia Garner keeps a sober iciness as defence but even this can be moulded by the more skilled advances of one of the younger men. Hugo Weaving is almost unrecognisable as the shifty and chaotic owner Billy. Ursula Yovich's Carol strikes poignant notes as his wife and the wisdom to control where she can and give up and run when she can't, fight or flight as a lifestyle.

Is The Royal Hotel an update on Wake in Fright? Not really. That was a man in a world of men stripped of his civilisation to the point where that quality might well have been more of an affectation than a cultured state. Liz and Hannah are barred from this by their gender and its value by that similar world of men. If there is a need to defend themselves against anything it is less the earlier film's corrosive sheen of mateship than a continuous threat of sexual assault. What it does share with Wake in Fright is the confronting reality of a culture that doesn't simply have a dark side but is busy obscuring such a thing. Recent public campaigns to render the wide brown land a better and more inclusive place, regardless of their success, have told us as much. The Royal Hotel is not a cover version of Wake in Fright, the pair of films are companion pieces which might easily swap time periods without too much change. If you don't find that confronting in itself you need to see the newer film and rewatch the older one.