The Royal Hotel

It's very well done, but I wish the story had more of an arc instead of just kinda... ending.

Grimy realistic tale set in the Aussie outback that has a sense of foreboding and builds tension right from the start. Don’t expect an American style slasher - it’s far more subtle and sinister than that. Definitely worth the 90 minute runtime,

Dripping in the stale, old booze smell of toxic masculinity, The Royal Hotel is a gender-politics driven drama about the unsettling, sneaking and sinister nature with which some men conduct themselves and operate around women. Tropes are subverted, knights-in-shining-armor are only acting in self interest and the granular misogyny entrenched in our daily life is put on full display with no smoke and mirrors to cover it's presence. While there is very little subtley to it's delivery, The Royal Hotel is a gripping drama that wears its feminist message on its sleeve, and its tight 90 minute runtime leaves little room to breathe. If that sounds like your bag, and you're also partial to a scowly performance from Juila Garner, give this one a whirl.

What Ruth Langmore did on her gap year.

Fuck this hotel. I would cancel my reservation and book something else. It is scary. sheeyit.

People are crazy. They need Jesus. Dont drink too much youre gonna be crazy and all the neighbours gonna hate you for real for real lifes hard but thats the deal.

I don't want to go to Australia.

This movie did a really good job in putting you into the shoes of the 2 lead characters. Every action feels like it'll lead to something sinister down the road. Lots of unexpected turns. A very solid, engaging, tight claustrophobic thriller that slowly closes in on you. Henwick and Garner absolutely kill it, and Hugo Weaving as the drunk, incompetent bar owner was perfect. So many characters that you want to trust and like but can't fully commit to, like I'm sure how the girls felt. There's a constant and balanced sense of uneasiness that was pretty unique.

Competently made, but its discussion of gender politics feels disingenuous and unbalanced. The movie tries to get away with how it depicts male behavior by setting the movie in the Australian outback, but the major leaps it asks for still ring to me as false. There’s nothing wrong with the dialogue or acting, it’s entirely the fault of the direction and story. For what it’s trying to do, all of the characters are simply too one dimensional. That could work if you throw in a layer of artifice, like _Barbie_ for example; however it stretches believability with this more realistic, grounded tone. As a result, a lot of of the (implied) tension didn’t really resonate with me either once it decides to go full thriller mode. Again, it’s not a terrible film, but it reeks of the wrong kind of feminism.

4.5/10

It was a good movie, in that it was well acted and the cinematography was good. But I don't think it really hit the mark. It never really sold me on the girls being in danger, and the atmosphere didn't really feel very tense to me.

I guess they were going for remote location + drunk men = danger. But it felt like just another friday night at the pub to me. It didn't feel like the girls should be afraid of the men in the pub. And I say that as a woman, in Australia.

Also, there was nothing that really tied this story to the outback. This could have been set in the city with exactly the same story. There are plenty of suburban places in Australia where there are no daily buses, or there are other reasons to be stuck in town for a couple of days. And to be honest those girls were not really stuck there. Sure the bus wasn't coming for two days, but we saw in the overhead shot when they arrived that this was not a small town. I'm sure they could have found accomodation elsewhere or arranged for alternative transport.

I had some other issues with things in the movie.

That the only work available for them was a remote job at a pub is total BS. There are so many places in Australia that hire backpackers and people on working holiday visas. Fruit picking, farm stays etc. There's always work.

The girls are meant to be really close friends, close enough that they share a bed (platonically) at various times, but we never really see a lot of evidence that friendship outside a few key moments. The friendship felt very two dimensional.

I also felt let down by the lack of women at the pub. Even in mining towns in Australia there are women. Women work in the mining industry. Even young women. But most of the women in this movie were caricature's of that trope that you have to be backwards, old and slightly crazy to be living in rural Australia.

I also had trouble with the ending. Which I will spoiler cut:

[spoiler] why did they set the pub on fire? the owner might have been asshole who didn't pay his staff or suppliers but he did not cause the girls any harm. It was just a random group of men who were being creepy. The owner was not at fault for anything that happened in the movie, and setting the pub on fire was just overkill, like the people who wrote the movie didn't know how to end it. [/spoiler]