The Royal Hotel Parent Guide

Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) have been backpacking around Australia, but their plans exceed their budget. The girls take up work at the remote Royal Hotel, an Outback bar roughly a million miles from nowhere and frequented by a rough assortment of local alcoholics and miners. The bar’s owner, Billy (Hugo Weaving), himself one of the local drunks, is a crude, generally unpleasant man with a noncommittal attitude to paying his staff – and he’s the least of their problems. While Liv is enjoying the coarse, rowdy atmosphere, Hanna has begun to notice behavior from some of the patrons that gives her pause. Liv brushes off Hanna’s concerns, but it’s starting to look like the girls have gotten themselves into something they won’t be able to get back out of…

Set as it is in a bar, you can expect a good deal of alcohol consumption in this film, and that’s indeed what you get. Characters bypass regular social drinking and cruise straight on into bad, messy, sloppy, make-terrible-decisions-you-won’t-find-out-about-until-morning drunkenness. There is also a great deal of profanity, including that peculiar Australian proclivity for the “C”-word. Chillingly, a constant, oppressive threat of sexual violence permeates the story, so, long story short, this is not a film for young or sensitive viewers.

The Royal Hotel is a difficult film to describe. I liked some aspects – the social commentary, the character studies, the capable management of tension, the cast – but I’m not sure how to feel about the film as a whole. Hanna, the central protagonist, has a bad habit of not telling Liv crucial information, but then being upset with her for arriving at different conclusions based on incomplete knowledge. Not that this is somehow unrealistic human behaviour, but boy is it annoying.

Mostly, the movie feels like a cautionary tale. It’s pretty clear that as a young woman in a foreign country with limited funds, taking a job at a rowdy miner bar hours away from law enforcement or emergency medicine isn’t a great idea. It’s also abundantly clear that there are serious problems with how we as a society view sexual harassment and threatening behaviour, especially when alcohol and money are involved. Good performances and brisk dialogue keep it from feeling preachy, but the film certainly has something to say. Whether or not you can hear it over the drunken yelling is another question.