Rent The Royal Hotel (2023)

Despite some brilliantly built-up suspense, the unrealistic characters & bad ending derail things - The Royal Hotel review by TB

A few months ago, I rented The Assistant, directed by Kitty Green & starring Julia Garner, looking at a day in the life of a PA to a big Hollywood mogul & witnessing the horrors going on behind closed doors, amongst the mundanity of office work. Despite the rave reviews, I found it an unbelievably boring & dull film, so much so I switched off after 40 minutes & gave it 2 stars. The only reason I rented this was because it starred Jessica Henwick, who was without a doubt the best thing in The Matrix Resurrections, and is a magnificent & magnetic screen presence.

Overall, I have mixed views about The Royal Hotel. One thing, which thank god is different with this film, is that Green, reuniting with Garner & casting Henwick as her co-star, has significantly cut down on the naval-gazingly long silences which was 90% of The Assistant's runtime (that I could tolerate watching it for.) Whilst we do have moments of reflection & contemplation, the narrative actually is filled with spiky, if sometimes wholly unrealistic characters.

Some of the other good points include really using the barren isolation & inhospitable climate/terrain of the Australian outback to accentuate & show to us as the viewer just how in the middle of nowhere these two women are. In a weird way, I found myself thinking of The Proposition, another film which was set in & used to full effect the barren & horrific climate of Australia, a world away from the sunny & happy adverts most tourists see.

There is also some excellent casting. Whilst Henwick's character Liv is the free-spirited & easy-going of the pair, my own favourite (if that's the right word,) is Daniel Henshall as Dolly. Dolly is an absolute psychotic scumbag, who really brings a menace & tension to the narrative. Out of all of the male characters, he is the one who stands out the most, completely commanding the screen whenever he is on it. The overall tension in the film is also handled extremely well, sometimes verging on horror as well as thriller territory.

But there are also for me many problems. The main one was the unrealistic writing, over time, of the male characters as a whole, alongside the various set-ups the women find themselves in. As in, whilst there were some of the men whose characters are written with some nuance, the script also often reverted to clichés & stereotypes to reinforce the message it was screaming out of the screen.

The worst of these examples was when one of the women asks for a lighter off one of the men & on it is an image of a naked woman. And the film holds this up as meaning that this patron is, for having this lighter, in the same league as the most repugnant & sexist other men, even though the woman seems to know him well/likes him & nowhere else in the story is he featured.

To be clear, I have no doubt that a lot of the behaviour which is shown happens, but I also am reviewing this film from a realism perspective. And the range that these men are portrayed as varies from absolutely disgusting & despicable misogynists to someone who might look at one of the women in a slightly suggestive manner. And they are all lumped in together & treated pretty much the same.

But the ending is the worst part of the whole film. Firstly it is totally unrealistic & "convenient" in it's timing, but secondly & more significantly, it just feels like the writer/director completely ran out of ideas & said "Finish the story now, as quickly & plausibly as possible." Which in this case, whilst quick, is in no way plausible. There is an attempt at redemption for one of the men, as well as a seeming need by the filmmakers to dish out some violent consequences, but it just feels cobbled together & unrealistic.

Whilst there is some good & genuinely gripping moments, overall it is a mess of ideas & manipulation.