Kitty Green’s outback thriller is at its best when nothing is quite happening: two backpackers behind a bar, a room of men, and the question of which one to worry about. It is tightly made for an hour and then loses its nerve. Still worth your evening.
Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) are American backpackers who take the only work going: a few weeks behind the bar of the Royal Hotel, the pub in a remote Australian mining town. Billy (Hugo Weaving) is the owner. Carol (Ursula Yovich) keeps the place running. Kitty Green, who made The Assistant with Garner, has taken her setup from Hotel Coolgardie, a 2016 documentary, and turned it into a thriller about being watched. For an hour it is as tense as anything we have seen in the genre. Then it has to end, and it does not quite know how.
Leah Popple’s pub looks like a real one: cracked tiles, a jukebox, stickers on the fridge, an upstairs bedroom with a lock that would not keep out a determined child. Michael Latham shoots the interior in brown half-light and the outside as white glare, so every time the door opens the frame burns out. The regulars arrive one at a time and the film lets us sort them. Dolly (Daniel Henshall) sits at the end of the bar and does not smile. Matty (Toby Wallace) is young and keen and probably fine. Teeth (James Frecheville) is large and shy and hard to read. Torsten (Herbert Nordrum), a traveller passing through, is the nearest thing to safe company. Green’s trick is that we are never sure we have sorted them right.
We spent most of the first hour with our jaw set, and the thing that did it was not a threat. It was a laugh. A joke goes round the bar that Hanna has not been let in on, the men roar, and Green holds on Garner while she works out whether to smile. Garner plays Hanna with her shoulders up and her eyes on the exits. Henwick’s Liv thinks it is all a bit of fun and says so, and the film is about the gap between the two women as much as about the men. Weaving is doing the hardest job in it: Billy is a mess rather than a monster, and Weaving lets him be pathetic and dangerous in the same scene without asking us to choose.
Jed Palmer’s score barely exists, and that is right. The pub is the score: bottles, the jukebox, a room of men laughing at once. Kasra Rassoulzadegan cuts the shifts into a rhythm, pour, laugh, wipe, lock up, so we learn the routine and feel the moment it breaks. Mariot Kerr’s costumes do quiet work too. Hanna covers up, Liv does not, and the men comment on both, which is the point.
The trouble is Liv. Henwick is good, but the script gives her one setting, cheerful and careless, and keeps her there long past the point where anyone would have caught on. We are told the two are old friends and never shown why. Then come the last twenty minutes, which we will not describe except to say the film stops watching and starts doing. It is well staged. It is also the first stretch where we could guess the next shot, and where Green, who has spent an hour refusing to tell us what to think, tells us. Several critics found the finish cathartic. We found it tidy.
The Assistant was a film in which nothing happened and it was unbearable. The Royal Hotel is louder, faster and easier to sit through, and a little less frightening for it. The best scenes here are still the ones closest to that earlier film: a man leaning over a bar an inch too far, a request that is not quite a request.
It runs 91 minutes and carries an 18 certificate, which we think is about right. If you have ever worked a bar you will recognise most of it and wish you did not. See it, and argue about the ending on the way home.
