Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick are against Hugo Weaving The Royal Hotel by Kitty Green, with a screenplay adapted from a true story.
We often forget that Australia has a vast desert of brick-colored earth. Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick), Canadian travelers whose credit cards are now empty, find themselves in the middle of nowhere. The two young women take a temporary job as waitresses in a seedy bar where Billy (Hugo Weaving), the boss, is disturbing to say the least because he is openly misogynistic – “smart cunt”, in other words “intelligent bitch” . are among the first words he addresses to Hanna. The insult quickly turns into “sour cunt” (“bitter bitch”) when she refuses to smile.
Behind the bar, which is actually a huge rectangle around which the crowd of temporary workers who have become permanent employees crowd, the duo experiences their first more than dubious jokes, sees their English predecessors dancing half-naked on the bar and finally decides, after consultation, to stay for a few weeks while they replenish their respective bank accounts.
Danger constantly hovers in all of co-writer and director Kitty Green’s plans. All women know the banality (here in the sense of Hannah Arendt when she speaks of the “banality of evil”) of this male violence, a deaf and silent threat that is constantly expressed in a contemptuous look, a denigrating attitude or an insulting gesture . Here, the threat of camera footage and sound editing becomes an oppressive prison, even in the outdoor scenes of the Australian outback.
“Will Hanna and Liv survive this, and if so, how? » is the question that concerns the viewer (and the viewer with particular focus) during the 91 minutes of this fear-inducing suspense. However, this is not the main point of The Royal Hotel. Kitty Green’s intention, as in her excellent The Assistant (also starring Julia Garner), is to examine the extent to which women are accustomed or habitual to tolerating assault at home.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5