In 2023, we are more likely to request 20 minutes less of most movies than 20 minutes more. Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel is a case of the latter. Green does good work setting up the conditions in an outback town sustained by a single industry (mining), with its overwhelming population of drunken males who pose a threat to the few women among them. Then – either in the interest of maintaining a tight 90 minutes, or in a more fundamental script miscalculation – the ending arrives with a suddenness that undermines the narrative rhythms she’s worked so hard to establish.

Two American tourists (Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick), who have been partying in Sydney, realise suddenly they are strapped for cash, and must take jobs if they want to prolong their Australian holiday. On such short notice, the placement office gives them no option but to take bartender jobs in a remote outback town visited only once weekly by a bus. The positive news is that it’s supposed to pay well, but that promise seems dubious when they arrive to find the owner of the Royal Hotel (Hugo Weaving) constantly drunk. He’s also given to casually dropping the c-word in their presence, usually directed at them. His indigenous wife (Ursula Yovich) is looking out for them, but given that she’s on his case about his debts to another local vendor, the prospects dim of Hanna and Liv working their way back to the Sydney party scene.

Then there are the men. Warned by the job placement office of needing to endure a little “male attention,” the tourists find the locals considerably more predatory than that harmless description. “Come on, love” is uttered more than once, literally or figuratively, as they are the only ones with two X chromosomes in a room increasingly dominated by rowdy and horny behaviour. While some of the locals show more of a puppy dog love of the newcomers, others seem intent on getting what they want by whatever means necessary – or short of that, at least leaving the women feeling skeeved out, regretting they ever tried to stand up for themselves in the face of such misogyny.

The Royal Hotel sounds like it has the chance to come across as man hating, but that’s not an accurate impression of what Green is doing here. Rather, the Melbourne-born writer-director is identifying true herd behaviour that develops in any isolated community where mating partners are scarce, work is of a physical nature and alcohol flows freely. If these characters were in Sydney they would more clearly be monstrous. Here, they are to some degree products of their environment. That does not mean Green excuses their wretched inclinations. It merely means she doesn’t need to include a saint among their lot to offset her depictions.

For anyone who’s spent time in a particularly rural pub on a Friday night, Green’s presentation of the Royal Hotel will ring true. The pub’s denizens walk that fine line between keeping and losing their humanity. On one particularly bad night with the owners not present, they could simply take the place by storm and help themselves to whatever drinks they wanted when the two barkeeps step outside in a moment of high stress and vulnerability. Instead, they try to summon them back for service – however lecherous that summoning may be.

By day, some of these blokes are good guys. We see a carefree excursion to a watering hole with one guy Matty (Toby Wallace) who’s super fun and charming. His mate Teeth (James Frecheville) is gruff but protective, a lot more likely to smash one of the men than lay a finger on one of these women. But then you’ve got cancers like the sinister Dolly (Daniel Henshall), who can make a whole room cower late one night at last call, even when he’s outnumbered five to one. Always adept at this sort of role, Henshall chills us to the bone.

Where The Royal Hotel goes is not so much the wrong place, but possibly the right place too quickly. And even if it is the right place, there are serious questions about whether it represents the sort of justice we should be barracking for. It’s probably not Green’s intention to mete out justice because the world rarely does that successfully. But there is meant to be a conventional satisfaction embedded in the payoff, and it feels a little out of sync. In other words, we are invited to cheer a potential outcome unproblematically, when it’s possibly a misplaced focus for legitimate rage.

This is Green’s second narrative feature after a pair of documentaries, and her second time working with Garner after 2019’s The Assistant. Given that The Assistant also dealt with monstrous men, in that case a thinly veiled stand-in for Harvey Weinstein and the system that supported him, she could quickly develop a reputation for outing men as the root of all evil. At her core, though, she is identifying flawed systems. There it was Hollywood, where the holy dollar made it advantageous to shelter reprehensible behaviour. The system here may not be so clear, but The Royal Hotel is as much an indictment of old-world industrial models that leave men to their baser instincts as it is an indictment of the men themselves. Green imagines these men becoming more civilised in a more urban environment with more structure and accountability.

Then there’s the fact that these women aren’t blameless – at least for finding themselves in this situation in the first place. They spent frivolously without checking their bank balances, such that it takes a declined attempt to buy drinks before they realise anything is wrong. Garner’s Hanna seems to have the better head on her shoulders, while Henwick’s Liv is unlikely to take the basic precautions to avoid calamity. The Royal Hotel wants to hold these tourists accountable as well.

Because Green could have used an additional 20 minutes to flesh out some of her ideas and temper some of her depictions, The Royal Hotel falls short of seeming like a complete work – which also means it could provide ammunition to those audiences sceptical of her intentions. It’s well worth seeing, it just might have been even more so at 125% of its current size, with slightly clearer thinking.

 

The Royal Hotel opens in cinemas today.