“You'll have to be comfortable with a fair amount of male attention.”
The Royal Hotel is a 2023 thriller directed and cowritten by Kitty Green. It follows up on the success of her previous film, The Assistant, with a story in a similar vein (and also starring Julia Garner).
Liv (Jessica Henwick) and Hanna (Garner) are two young women on vacation in Sydney who suddenly run out of funds, forcing them to take a job slinging beers at a pub in the Australian Outback. The location is extremely remote and the clientele are almost exclusively rowdy male miners. Their crass behaviour gradually makes Hanna more and more uncomfortable, but Liv and their employer, Billy (Hugo Weaving), don't seem to care. Hours away from cellphone reception or any major settlement, it soon becomes clear they're on their own…
The Royal Hotel has examples of these tropes:
- Ambiguous Situation: everything about our protagonists' background. Are they actually Canadian or just pretending to be because, as Liv says, “People love Canadians”? What are they running away from? Why is Liv behaving so self-destructively?
- Bad People Abuse Animals: given how many venomous snakes live in the land down under, most Aussies would probably not call someone a bad person for killing one. But after Liv & Hanna ask Dolly to deal with a huge snake in their living quarters, Hanna is horrified when Dolly kills it and presents it to her in a jar, and decides he must be dangerous.
- Bait the Dog: even after Hanna's most trying shift yet, she's still charmed when Matty starts playing Mental As Anything's “The World Seems Difficult” and asks her to dance. She goes to let him in — only to slam the door shut again when she sees he brought creepy psychopath Dolly with him. Cue the two men straight up smashing their way into the pub and the girls' room to drag a drunken Liv out to their car to “go see the sunrise”.
- Big Damn Heroes: Subverted in the climax. Teeth rams Dolly's truck and starts beating the shit out of him as he tries to drag Liv away, but his dialogue reveals he's only doing it out of a competitive sense of entitlement to Liv herself, not heroism.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Matty, unfortunately. He's very friendly at first, even apologizing for trying to pressure Hanna into sex and playing romantic music for her. His playful demeanour stays in place right up until the point where he forces his way into the women's quarters with Dolly and accidentally injures Hanna's face wrestling her for the axe.
- The Bogan: almost every male character in the film is a blue collar Aussie machine that converts alcohol into casual misogyny.
- Casanova Wannabe: Dolly fits the bill, though he pretty quickly descends into screaming and throwing things when Hanna declines his advances.
- Country Matters: this being Australia, yeah it comes up a lot — though only Hanna is offended by it, with Liv writing it off as just a dialect thing.
- Dark and Troubled Past: hinted at, in Liv & Hanna's case. Hanna makes an offhand remark about travelling to the middle of nowhere because “it was the furthest away,” and Liv's Hard-Drinking Party Girl tendencies appear to be driven by something similar. She mentions the purpose of their trip was to “get away from everything” and breaks down in tears when it's brought up.
- Dogged Nice Guy: Teeth has a crush on Liv and is the only major male character who's consistently nice to her & Hanna, even unintentionally helping them at one point; though his feelings are not reciprocated and in the end he acts just as entitled as the others.
- Entitled to Have You: most of the male characters suffer from this, but the cake taker is Dolly, who flips his shit and starts trashing the bar when Hanna won't have a beer with him while she's supposed to be working. Even the otherwise harmless Teeth, who comes to Liv & Hanna's rescue in the finale, is mad at Dolly not for his rapey behaviour but because he has decided Liv is “his” and calls her a “crazy bitch” when she refuses to leave with him instead.
- Grin of Rage: After Hanna bursts the rear tires of Dolly's truck, he just stares at her with a mirthless grin plastered on his face. It's a disturbing departure from his angry drunken tirade in the bar the night before.
- Hard-Drinking Party Girl: the two young English women working at the pub when Liv and Hanna arrive. We see them pounding back liquor, dancing on the bar, flashing the crowd, and having sex with at least one of the miners (one of them implies she has done this before, for cash). Liv also seems bound and determined to become this, only snapping out of it when Hanna acquires a black eye while trying to stop her from driving off with Dolly and Matty who were most likely going to try to rape her.
- I Have You Now, My Pretty: it's subtle, but when Dolly and his friends try to drive off with a heavily intoxicated Liv in their truck, it's clear they have ill intentions.
- "Just Joking" Justification: crops up quite a bit, from the male customer making uncomfortably sexual “blonde jokes” at Hanna (who is blonde) and getting offended when she ignores him, to Dolly trying to pass off a violent tirade against Hanna and two other customers as “a joke”.
- Karma Houdini: Unfortunately, Matty gets off scot-free despite helping Dolly's attempted abduction of Liv and accidentally injuring Hanna's face. Given that his dad owns the mine, he's unlikely to face any consequences offscreen either.
- Kill It with Fire: The movie ends with the girls burning the pub down and walking away.
- Misplaced Retribution: During Dolly's meltdown over Hanna's refusal to have a beer with him, he also begins accosting an older married couple who happens to be present, throwing money at them and cursing them out for no other reason than that they happen to be there while he's pissed at Hanna.
- No Woman's Land: the titular pub is not the most overt example, but it certainly isn't safe for our protagonists. They haven't even been there a day when Billy barges in on them in the shower (they have towels on, but it isn't as if he bothers to check). From the outset, the demanding clientele bombard them with off-colour jokes and sexual harassment but escalate to violent tantrums and attempted kidnappings when their advances are ignored. Just to hammer home how little anyone cares about their safety, when Hanna asks Billy to ban Dolly for screaming at her and a pair of customers while pelting them with coins because she wouldn't have a drink with him, Billy scoffs and refuses, saying he “would have to ban them all.” None of the miners so much as bat an eye at their colleagues shoving a woman to the ground or driving off with a severely intoxicated woman in their truck.
- Not Good with Rejection: Dolly starts aggressively hitting on Hanna one night near the end of her shift and trying to get her to have a beer with him. When she says no, he flies off the handle, verbally attacking her and a pair of innocent bystanders and flinging coins at them.
- Oh, Crap!: Matty's playful attitude finally cracks when he tries to grab the axe away from Hanna and drunkenly injures her face. He's no longer laughing at that point.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Liv is the red oni, throwing herself into the party lifestyle and enjoying the men's attention much more than Hanna, the blue oni, who is more reserved and cautious (which ultimately keeps a bad situation from getting worse). It's set up in their very first scene, with Hanna being the one to learn they're out of money and immediately go tell Liv, who can barely stop making out with a guy she just met long enough to care. In the third act they almost trade places, with Hanna demanding to leave while Liv wants to stay, and Hanna angrily swinging an axe at the men trying to abduct Liv while Liv tells her to leave it alone.
- Uncertain Doom:
- the third act kicks off with Billy being taken to the hospital — a three hour drive away. He never reappears in the film, so it's uncertain if he survives or not.
- The last we see of Dolly is Teeth beating the crap out of him. Shortly after, Teeth storms into the bar raging that he “kicked [Dolly’s] head in”. Who knows if Dolly survived the beating.
