Review by Andrew Swafford
Hollywood has taken several stabs at making a “movie of the moment” to capture the Weinstein scandal and the #MeToo movement with movies like She Said, Bombshell, Promising Young Women, among others – but nobody nailed it quite like Kitty Green, whose 2019 feature The Assistant perfectly captured institutional predation by choosing never to show its face. In that film, Julia Garner plays a secretary in the office of a Weinsteinlike figure the audience never sees, and Kitty Green’s tight, controlled camerawork gives the clean, well-furnished space a sense of ambient threat that would otherwise remain completely invisible. The Assistant is a monster movie, but the monster isn’t even Weinstein – it’s the faceless, Kafkaesque bureaucracy propping him up.
In The Royal Hotel, Kitty Green’s follow-up to The Assistant, the monsters are everywhere. This, too, is a film about institutional rape culture, but of a kind far less insidious and clandestine. Set almost entirely in a rowdy bar that serves as a central watering hole for a remote Australian mining town, The Royal Hotel depicts sexual harassment against women at its most casual and flagrant, with all manner of unwanted attention and aggression shrugged off with “I was just being nice” or “it was just a joke. In the world of this film, catcalling, misogynistic slurs, and physical violation is so normalized as to become almost blasé, and the one woman who attempts to push back against this everyday violence (Julia Garner, again), repeatedly finds herself dismissed or outright targeted in response. While The Assistant exposed a single machine from the point of its smallest cog, The Royal Hotel attempts to tackle the full breadth of sexual harassment experienced by women from a bird’s eye view, and the resulting story is more schematic than compelling.
The point that The Royal Hotel seems to make – that ordinary women are subject to sexual threat on an everyday basis – is one that I find valuable and important, but truth alone does not make for compelling cinema. While The Assistant communicated its ideas primarily through form, with the edges of the frame generating claustrophobic dread that can’t be fully communicated in words, The Royal Hotel is almost all verbal. And somewhat appropriately so: the various threats of The Royal Hotel lurk in mindless jabber drowned out by the din of a crowded bar. The cinematography and editing of the film, however, doesn’t do nearly as much to convey that sense of pandemonium as The Assistant did to convey its sense of eerie quiet. Perhaps following up a film as special as The Assistant is an impossible task, or perhaps working with a different cinematographer (and no longer working as her own editor) this time has made her filmmaking that much less potent – but whatever the case, The Royal Hotel feels ordinary and unremarkable by comparison.
Throughout the runtime of this film, I kept waiting for it to turn into a full-tilt home invasion movie. It has all the trappings: a remote location, a “final girl” protagonist, a town full of sketchy guys. There are even hatchets and jars full of snakes lying around, constantly hinting towards a more broadly appealing thrill ride hiding just under the surface of this indie social problem movie. In certain moments, things tip in that direction – shadowy figures breaking windows of locked doors and the like – but the film too often remains safely on the naturalistic side of the divide that separates so-called “art cinema” from supposedly lower-brow genre fare. If Kitty Green is going for a broad-strokes treatise on rape culture culminating in a violent catharsis that screams “burn it all down,” I wish the filmmaking were pulpy enough to make the whole thing a more bombastic experience. As it stands, The Royal Hotel seems to insist on not being fun, as though the pressure for a film to be enjoyable were the same as skiing a woman to smile more.