The Royal Hotel

The Royal Hotel

After running out of money while backpacking in a tiny, male-dominated town in the Australian outback, two friends resort to a working holiday at the Royal Hotel. When the locals behavior starts crossing the line, the girls find themselves trapped in an unnerving situation that grows rapidly out of their control.

  • Released:
  • Runtime: 91 minutes
  • Genre: Drama, Thrillers
  • Stars: Jessica Henwick, Julia Garner, Hugo Weaving, Toby Wallace, Nick Slater, James Frecheville, Daniel Henshall, Barbara Lowing, Ursula Yovich, Alex Malone, Bree Bain
  • Director: Kitty Green
 Comments
  • truthspeaker-17825 - 9 June 2024
    Pointless
    Not a wholly unenjoyable watch, but had a definite feel as though whoever wrote it was making it up as they went along.

    Meandering and with no satisfying resolution to any plot points, the story is about two young backpacker women who go to work in an outback pub and discover loads of unruly drunk people. That's it. The moral of the story is: "Some drunk people are worse than others."

    And (spoiler alert) the way they resolve it is to burn the place down. This simply means that the town will build another pub and the landlady woman who works there full-time no longer has an income. What a powerful feminist statement.
  • TxMike - 30 April 2024
    Two Canadian girls in the Australian outback.
    There is a 2016 documentary about Hotel Coolgardie, an out of the way Australian spot where foreign backpackers can work for a time to earn money, but also where two Finnish backpackers faced inhumane treatment while working as bartenders.

    This movie, "The Royal Hotel" is a fictional story that was inspired by Hotel Coolgardie. It starts in Sydney, where Canadian friends, Julia Garner as Hanna and Jessica Henwick as Liv, find themselves without funds. There in fact is a real Work and Travel program in Australia for travelers between the ages of 18 and 30 who want to earn and travel. So the two friends take advantage of that.

    They get a bus ticket to a remote spot, they end up at the fictional Royal Hotel which has rooms where they stay, but is primarily a pub. The owner is played excellently by "Matrix" veteran, Hugo Weaving.

    Some things happen but the movie is really about the unpleasantness that female bar workers often must contend with. As the filmmakers explain, it doesn't have to be in the Australian outback, it could be in a Manhattan bar, as rowdy men get boozed up and threaten to cross the line in behavior.

    While I don't rate this movie very highly I found it interesting and the main actors are all very good. At home on DVD from my public library, my wife read the description and skipped.
  • agibson-97396 - 23 March 2024
    Ummm... thriller NO
    Whoever marketed this movie as a "thriller" is off. It's tool over an hour for anything that could possibly be considered "thrilling" to happen. The characters were just ridiculous. It was so slow moving we just kept waiting and waiting and waiting for something to happen - swearing it would because of the preview. Well I'm telling you do NOT think you are getting what it looks like in the preview. It's about 2 young female adults (maybe - just barely out of high schools) looking for an adventure and instead they get a bunch of male animals who haven't seen the female species in all their life.