“The Royal Hotel,” the setting of Kitty Green’s ulcer-inducing thriller, is a sun-baked bar in a rural Australian mining town surrounded by terrain so monotone that Canadian backpackers Hanna (Juli…
) can’t keep their eyes open on the way in. The two young women arrive at their barmaid jobs with a sense palpable disorientation. They’ve quite literally woken up in Oz, and they don’t know the people, the customs, the nicknames for the local ales, or the way out.
The worst part? This setup is true. Green and her co-writer Oscar Redding have based the script on Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary “Hotel Coolgardie,” named for this desolate stretch of land where #MeToo has yet to arrive. The doc followed the miseries of two Finnish girls, one of whom never recovered from the gig. This fictionalized adaptation tweaks the characters’ names — goodbye “Canman,” hello “Teeth” — and forgoes the original’s flatly-lit cinematic neutrality.
There’s a way these movies usually go: a sexual attack and then bloody, vengeful catharsis. Green uses our anticipation to her advantage. She gets us looking for danger in every scene — and we usually find it. The director is using this bar as a terrarium of a toxic dynamic that exists, well, everywhere. She’s taken us here, to this extremely specific place, to sharpen our awareness of the tiniest red flags that flap around the globe.
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