Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick are both impressive in an uneasy Australia-set film toying with genre expectations but tension dissipates in the finale
The hoary sub-genre that is “attractive American tourists find something nefarious on their travels” is given a vigorous polish in thoughtful thriller The Royal Hotel, a film light on exploitation and heavy on interrogation.
It’s an intriguing follow-up for writer-director Kitty Green, whose last film The Assistant was a simple yet stinging drama about a young woman, played by Julia Garner, working, and cleaning up, for a predatory Weinstein-like figure. Green’s approach to the subject was defter than most, an unusual way into a story most of us already knew far too much about, and there’s a similar sensitivity here for the most part, grounding a potentially schlocky situation. Garner returns as Hanna, joined by Glass Onion’s Jessica Henwick as Liv, two women running out of money on their travels in Australia, forced to take whatever work is available. Their only option is a pub in a remote mining community, run by Hugo Weaving’s crotchety inebriate, with no wifi but plenty of horny locals.
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