How Kitty Green's 'The Royal Hotel' refuses to play by the rules of horror
Two young women with backpacks make their way down a deserted road toward a remote pub in the Australian Outback, where they have been contracted to work for a few weeks. Most movie fans will think they know what's going to happen next.
The new film "The Royal Hotel," directed and co-written by Kitty Green, looks to subvert those expectations at every turn. Americans Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) have been hiking through Australia and have run out of money. They agree to work in a bar in a rural mining town. What they find there is a group of men who may be threatening, who may be harmless but who will definitely test the limits of them both.
Green's previous picture, 2019's "The Assistant," also starred Garner, playing a young office worker at a Miramax-like New York City film production company with a pervasive atmosphere of power imbalance and a constant threat of harassment. Whereas "The Assistant" was tightly contained, with an almost abstract sense of menace and pressure, "The Royal Hotel" makes it clear what the threat could be, but when or if things actually take a turn toward the sinister is another matter.
Green's new thriller had its world premiere at the and opened Friday in limited release. During a
