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"The Royal Hotel"
Americans Hanna (Julia Garner), and Liv (Jessica Henwick), are best friends backpacking in Australia. After they run out of money, Liv, looking for an adventure, convinces Hanna to take a temporary live-in job behind the bar of a pub called ’The Royal Hotel’ in a remote Outback mining town. Bar owner Billy and a host of locals give the girls a riotous introduction to Down Under drinking culture but soon Hanna and Liv find themselves trapped in an unnerving situation that grows rapidly out of their control.
The film is inspired by the feature documentary 'Hotel Coolgardie'. It's the story of two young Scandinavian women trapped in an Australian mining town. This clash of cultures feels like a way into a broader discussion about drinking culture and gender dynamics. There’s a part of us that understands that pub world and a part of us that's terrified by it. "The Royal Hotel" feels like an opportunity to do that by putting the two lead characters into a remote community, exploring how these two women navigate an unfamiliar and antagonistic environment, far removed from the urban existence they're used to. "The Royal Hotel" explores Hanna and Liv's experiences within the intense and volatile setting they find themselves in, while also delving into the underlying factors that contribute to its hostility. Hanna doesn't want to be there in the first place and she's feeling vulnerable most of the time, while Liv is more inclined to say ‘lighten up, it's not that bad…it’s just the culture'. With these two characters the film shows the subtleties in the way that women respond in these kinds of circumstances. The film wants to tell this outback story, through a female gaze, to turn the tables on a genre that's traditionally been very male, and to use the masculinity of that world as the fuel for the story, and to be able to examine some of the complications around male culture, but it feels reductive.
The central dramatic question of this film is not will they get out? It’s ‘should they?’ It's a much more subtle question, because it goes to the heart of this very masculine culture and what's unacceptable within that culture. It's a film that builds slowly and inexorably to the question of should they leave. It's about the way people respond to trauma. There's one way where you can be very on high alert, very fearful, or the other way, where you just dive in and drink it all away. The ending is a provocation. It generates conversation around what's acceptable within our culture and when we should stand up for ourselves and take a stand. And it’s a situation that's all too common for young women going into environments where they've little power; where they can start doubting whether their version of reality is the real version and start being co-opted into a culture that is making them feel like they're the ones who are crazy.
"The Royal Hotel" is set in a mining town and not a farming community so we were quite specific about what the landscape should look like. Mining towns are set up to support industry and are mostly filled with fly-in fly-out workers from interstate. The film wants the set to feel normal and inviting in the way that pubs quite often do, but it feels cold or menacing. This place is a threat. While the film has nods to thriller and Western genres, it cannot be readily characterised as a genre piece. Certainly, it's like a nightmare and at times we're almost verging towards horror, but you can not describe this as a genre film. The trick of it and the balancing act within it's that you're observing real behaviours, but you're coming at it from a particular perspective and by ramping up certain key moments you're heightening tensions within it.
Written by Gregory Mann
