#TIFF23 Review: The Royal Hotel (Gala Presentations)

By John Corrado

★★½ (out of 4)

The 2023 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 7th to 17th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.

Kitty Green’s follow up to The Assistant (a #MeToo drama that was about Harvey Weinstein without actually being about Harvey Weinstein), The Royal Hotel explores similar themes of young women facing workplace harassment, only instead of a Hollywood production office the setting this time is a rural bar in the outskirts of Australia. The results are decent, but also slightly diminished.

Loosely adapted from the 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie, The Royal Hotel follows two young women from Canada, Hanna (The Assistant‘s Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick), who run out of money while on vacation in Australia, and impulsively decide to sign up for a work abroad program to earn some cash. They are sent to work at The Royal Hotel, which serves as the local watering hole for a rough and tumble mining town. The bar is inhabited by boorish locals who view the young women as fresh meat to be broken in, constantly harassing them on the job.

There is no real protection from this workplace harassment, with the bar’s owner, Billy (Hugo Weaving) – who is himself often intoxicated – giving a lot of leeway to the behaviour of his patrons. The film is at its best when establishing a sense of place, immersing us in the grungy isolation of this bar through the production design and Michael Latham’s cinematography. Green does a good job of building a quietly unsettling tone throughout, which we know could erupt at any moment, and the performances are also solid. Garner is very good as a young woman growing increasingly anxious and frustrated by the sexual harassment, while Henwick’s Liv more tries to grin and bear it.

But the film is shortchanged somewhat by a scant ninety minute running time, that leaves its characters feeling underdeveloped. This is also, by design, a less subtle film than The Assistant. The film starts to pick up in the last act, before an abrupt ending that takes dramatic liberties with the documentary, but feels too sudden and overblown compared to the more quiet intensity of everything that comes before.