Pulling beers at a remote hotel sets tension for outback noir
Two young backpackers get a job at a pub in a mining town - and plenty of unwanted male attention - in new psychological thriller The Royal Hotel.
The Royal Hotel (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★★
“Keep it locked. It’s a pub for f..k’s sake.’’
That’s the first order Carol (Ursula Yovich) issues to two young backpackers who have arrived to tend the bar at a hotel in the middle of the Australian nowhere.
It’s wise advice and not delivered unkindly. In this mining town the pub is the church and home of the men who work there. Carol, an Indigenous Australian, is the co-owner and the cook.
The backpackers – Hanna (Julia Garner from the 2017-2022 TV series Ozark) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) – say they are from Canada because “everybody loves Canadians”. Their homeland is not revealed but it’s a fair bet it is the US.
Their adoption of the red maple leaf may also be a nod to the movie this one will be compared with: Wake in Fright, the 1971 Australian masterpiece directed by a Canadian (Ted Kotcheff).
The one bloke Carol can’t lock out after closing time is her co-owner husband Bill (Hugo Weaving). If their accounts are in the red, it may be because he’s drinking the joint dry. It’s an interesting role to see Weaving in.
“You think you’re a smart c..t,’’ he says to Hanna on their first meeting. “I like that. We could use one around here.” The scene where he shows his two new workers the ropes brims with the tension that dominates the 90 minutes of The Royal Hotel.
Hanna is a little reserved. She rarely smiles and the other men dub her the “sour c..t’’. Liv is more outgoing. They are young and attractive and almost needless to say the men fancy them.
The men are a weird mob. Teeth (James Frecheville) is strong and silent. Dolly (Daniel Henshall) is an over-starer. Matty (Toby Wallace) is handsome but, like all of them, drinks too much.
“I am scared of everyone and everything in this place,’’ Hanna tells her friend. That state of fright is at the core of this movie directed and co-written (with Oscar Redding) by US-based Australian filmmaker Kitty Green.
It’s the fear of what might happen. “It’s a large mining area so you’re going to have to be OK with a little male attention,’’ notes the woman who finds them the job. The director and cast are good at maintaining this suspense.
This movie was inspired by Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie. Green is best-known as a documentary maker. She cast Garner in her previous feature, The Assistant (2019).
The Royal Hotel is well-scripted and well-acted.
It’s a different take on outback noir, the Australian genre-of-the-moment that is a huge hit with overseas readers and viewers.
It’s no Wake in Fright, but that’s hardly a criticism. For this critic, that drama filmed in Broken Hill, based on the 1961 novel by Kenneth Cook, is Australia’s greatest film.
Cat Person (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★★★
What’s the best kiss on the silver screen? I’ll show my age and pucker up to Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind (1939) and Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity (1953).
In more recent times memorable smooches include the upside-down kiss between Kirsten Dunst and Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man (2002) and Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio’s down-with-the-ship pash in Titanic (1997).
There are a million more and readers will have their own favourites.
The idea came to mind as I watched the psychological thriller Cat Person, based on a 2017 New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian that went viral online.
The story was timely then and remains so today. It’s about the differences between how we present ourselves via text messages and emails and in the flesh.
It’s not about using fake names or false photographs or other forms of outright deception. It’s subtler than that. It’s about how we can use the digital sphere to present a more attractive version of ourselves.
The aforementioned “in the flesh” is pivotal. When the two main characters have their first kiss, it is awful for one of them. “Clumsy and mauling,’’ she texts her best friend Taylor (Australian actor Geraldine Viswanathan, who is an emerging star).
She is 20-year-old university student Margot (Emilia Jones from the 2022 Oscar winner CODA) and he is 34-year-old Robert (Nicholas Braun, the gangly cousin Greg in the 2018-2023 TV series Succession).
The kiss scene is a credit to the actors. You can feel how bad it is. It’s topped, or bottomed perhaps, soon after, when they sleep together on their second date.
If there’s an Oscar for Best Performance in a Bad Sex Scene, look no further. This scene also shows the inventiveness with which director Susanna Fogel (The Spy Who Dumped Me from 2018) and writer Michelle Ashford (the 2013 TV series Masters of Sex) turn a 7000-word story into a two-hour film.
There are two Margots in the shot: the one having sex and the one watching on and advising her to stop. “Say, ‘I have changed my mind’,” the other self says. But the Margot between the sheets thinks “it’s just easier to get it over with”.
The cat person of the title is Robert. Part of his text wooing of Margot is making jokes about his two cats. “He does cat voices,’’ one of her friends says in approval. “Ooh, that is adorable and sexy.”
Yet when Margot goes to his house, she sees no cats.
By text, Robert is witty, intelligent and charming. He’s a regular at the cinema where Margot works part-time. So she knows he’s not bad looking. Indeed at the outset, she’s the one who’s into him. Then the bad sex happens. She wants to move on but he does not. His texts continue. The tantalising questions are: Is he a nice bloke who is inexperienced in romance or is he, as frontline feminist Taylor thinks, a stalker and probable serial killer?
Is she a young woman who regrets a bad date and wants to put it behind her or is she the manipulative and dangerous one?
The director cuts between real Margot and Margot’s imaginings in a clever way, particularly when it comes to the mysteriously missing cats.
I have a firm view on the answers to each question but I’ll leave it to viewers to come to their own conclusions.
Braun is perfectly cast as the doofus who may be a psycho. There are signs Margot notices but ignores, such as his passion for Harrison Ford.
When they see a Star Wars movie, he pre-empts Ford’s lines out loud and, later, corrects her pronunciation of Han Solo. I mean, can there be a brighter red light?
Jones, too, is excellent as a young woman working out the emotional life of a world where human interaction happens more online than in person.
To do so she has to decide whether to obey or defy the twenty-something woman’s online rules, such as Never Text Twice and Don’t Send Cleavage Photos. There’s a lot of humour in how she deals with this.
If you have read the story, you will know how it ends. In a daring and successful move, the filmmakers add another chapter that continues Roupenian’s modern morality tale without in any way changing its intent. And, yes, it does include the moggies that may or may not exist.
This is a highly intelligent, finely-acted, astutely-written and directed, well-shot (cinematographer Manuel Billeter) film that will leave questions in your mind well after the credits roll.
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