PREMISE
US backpackers Hanna and Liv take a job in a remote Australian pub for some extra cash and are confronted with a bunch of unruly locals and a situation that grows rapidly out of their control.
THE GOOD STUFF
JULIA GARNER- I find it really strange that Julia Garner’s aesthetic really hasn’t changed that much since she played Ruth Langmore in the all-time great TV show Ozark for five seasons. Now, she’s done dramatically different characters than Ruth, yet all of her characters tend to look like Ruth, and it seems to be something that only bothers me, but I feel it’s worth saying.
Although her characters all look exactly the same, Julia Garner is a legitimate, low-key leading lady. She is this story’s heart, soul, anchor, and audience perspective. She knocks it out of the park with every single solitary scene.
THE BAD STUFF
THE SUPPORTING CHARACTERS- In my opinion, Independent dramas such as this hinge on their supporting characters being, at the very least, useful and memorable. In this film, all of them (outside of a character played by Hugo Weaving and his wife, played by Ursula Yovich) are utterly predictable and throwaway. There’s really no in-depth explanation as to what makes these horrendous people surrounding our protagonists as horrendous.
This is a psychological thriller that I’ve heard some people refer to as a horror film in the same fashion as films like GREEN ROOM, THE BELKO EXPERIMENT, or something like SLEEPWALKERS. The thing is, every one of those films has supporting characters that at least add something to the story or present at least A TINY BIT of unpredictability to the proceedings. When it comes to ALL of the supporting characters here, you really can tell what their motivations are just by looking at them even before they speak.
THE UGLY STUFF
DECISION MAKING…
Look, in horror films, I have always felt that there is a tremendous difference in feeling tension for a character who is truly a victim of circumstance and not someone who is honestly reaping the consequences of ignoring warnings and red flags of bad things that will indefinitely occur. When the horrible stuff really starts happening in this movie, it shouldn’t shock the audience. Why? Because every truly terrible thing that occurs in this film results from verbal warnings AND visual red flags that the protagonists ignore. Big Red flags. Warning signs that any reasonable human being would immediately react to in a way that the protagonists do not.
The character played by Jessica Henwick has no purpose in this movie other than to deliberately walk into trouble in order for Garner’s character to rescue her. There really is no backstory as to why this is. She’s not presented as self-destructive or self-hating before they get into town or anything of the like. She’s just there for the sake of Garner’s character to babysit her, which is what she does for the entirety of the third act of this film.
I didn’t see this with too many people. There were maybe 20 of us in the theater at the time in which I saw it. Even within the people that were there, there was audible commentary/quips chiding the ridiculous decision-making of both of these protagonists more than once.
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Back in the day, I wrote a review of a horror movie called men by Alex Garland. MEN is a film that deals with a nearly identical kind of story more effectively while embodying more traditional horror elements like blood and gore. MEN wasn’t necessarily a modern-day type of tale, which also separates it from THE ROYAL HOTEL. MEN executes this kind of story so much better than THE ROYAL HOTEL that I kind of want to go back and redo my review of it. Or at least add a post-script that apologizes for the review that I gave that film. The Royal hotel takes all the errors of that film and magnifies them noticeably.Â
THE ROYAL HOTEL is in theaters now
