With the strike and with COVID there has been an awful lot of sophomoric releases this year aswell as our many veteran filmmakers who came back to the fold. This year alone has seen multiple exciting female directors returning for their second major films and although my excitement was lesser so to see what Emerald Fennel did next (Saltburn is a far different barrel of fish), this year gave two excellent films of complete polar opposite qualities with Bottoms which I have already lauded multiple times over now, and Kitty Green’s sensational film The Royal Hotel. Green delivering a follow up here to her similarly astounding film The Assistant, by far one of my favourites of that year and with Royal Hotel, Green does not disappoint in anyway and delivers one of my favourite films of this year also.
This story of
two backpackers who take up work in a outback Aussie bar is the sort of premise
that would lead one to believe that it could be a great coming of age drama or
even a broad 80’s comedy or for that matter one of the darker thrillers of the
Ausploitation era – but of course Green has shown herself now once again to be
one of the great film-makers of dread and tension currently working. Perhaps
Green’s greatest strengths looking at both this and The Assistant is her
craft at the 90 minute slow burn thriller, now where this film takes a creative
and narrative shift is the ultimate culmination of this slow burn and whereas
her narrative debut is one that is fundamentally about the lack of culmination
or resolution for that matter, Hotel is a film that builds and builds
indeed to a violent and justified end that feels so perfect as The
Assistant’s conclusion felt perfect to its arc. Green here is nothing but a
truly astounding handler of tone and dread, every beat and every line of
dialogue reeks of believability and subtle brutality. It’s as subtlety visceral
and impacting a thriller as one will find this year. The film’s two leads puts
Green working once again with Julia Garner and for the first time with Jessica
Henwick. Garner and Henwick here are both superb, but Garner is on truly top
form and despite Henwick having the larger character arc, it is Garner’s
resolution and her stuntedness in the face of adversity that make her work
exceptional. The film features an ensemble mostly of vile men of various levels
of vileness that reveal themselves in a variety of shocking and inevitable
ways; James Frechville and Toby Wallace are both brilliant, Hugo Weaving
delivers truly some of the best drunken acting I’ve ever seen, but it is Daniel
Henshall with his cold and horrid menace that makes this not just one of the
tautest thrillers of the year but also at times one of the most brutally
impacting horrors too.
An impeccably tight 9/10 thrill ride that packs into its slow-burn 91 minutes the most brilliant of unfolding tensions and throughout has an air of ever so realistic dread for anybody whose worked in a bar, and for that matter anybody who has been simply in situations of discomfort they feel trapped in. It is a film of violence and sexuality in subtle ways that once again Green as a director excels at. Green and Garner are a pair that I can only hope continue to work together and in this era where we long it seems for great director and actor pairings to add to the cannon, it’s beyond a certainty for me that if the films remain at this incredible level of craft and quality, then Garner and Green will be such a pair.
SPOILER P.S. Only speaking vaguely of course but this offers the sort of ‘burning down the house’ ending that I feel was so much of what I praised The Assistant for in direct comparison to a film that received far more praise and was for me far less successful in Promising Young Woman. Here instead we get the empowering ending that in this case was entirely effective although initially perhaps something that I did brush up against.
- Thomas Carruthers
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