The Royal Hotel ★★★★

EVERY Australian has experienced a hotel like the one portrayed in the powerful The Royal Hotel.

Basic, isolated and full of predominantly male clientele, it can become an alcohol-fuelled environment dangerous at times for anyone, let alone young, single women.

Kitty Green’s film expertly and dispassionately presents this scenario, creating a modern equivalent of the classic Australian film Wake in Fright.

In that 1971 film a male schoolteacher is seduced and changed forever by his exposure to an unforgiving society of toxic masculinity over a fateful, few days.

Green’s film takes two women on a different journey within a similar setting. Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick play Canadian backpackers who run out of money and take a job earning quick cash behind the bar at a remote hotel.

The two-storey Royal looks like it may have been a grand sight at one time, but has seen much better days, particularly now that it is owned and run by the alcoholic Billy, a terrifically naturalistic performance by Hugo Weaving.

By day there is nothing to do, but at night the hotel is invaded by male workers from the nearby mining community, including several who take an interest in one or both of the “new meat”, as they are described by somebody on the chalkboard menu outside.

The women try their best to maintain a sense of professionalism and decorum, but this is constantly tested by the horde that seems to think anything and everything is their property, berating the women for not smiling enough and drunkenly wandering inside and outside the pub after closing time.

Green slowly ratchets the atmosphere and tension to points where it is almost unbearable, and we are unsure in what direction it will go next.

But the film also wonderfully subverts expectations as well, to the point where it leads to what can only be described as both a surprising and inevitable conclusion.