The Royal Hotel proves you don’t need to show sexual violence to depict rape culture

Writer-director Kitty Green said that reviewers and financiers called out her new film over its lack of overt sexual violence. This harrowing outback drama shows us everything but – and is all the more chilling for it, writes Louis Chilton

Waking in fright: Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick in ‘The Royal Hotel’ (Transmission Films)

The Royal Hotel isn’t interested in subtlety. The film – the second feature from writer-director Kitty Green, out now in cinemas – follows two young American women (played by Inventing Anna’s Julia Garner and Game of Thrones’s Jessica Henwick) who travel to a remote pub in the Australian outback for a few weeks of short-notice work. The Royal Hotel is something of a misnomer: the titular boozer is a dive, owned by the decrepit, boorish Billy (Hugo Weaving). There are elements of The Royal Hotel that recall the once-lost outback masterpiece Wake in Fright; both films present Aussie drinking culture as a kind of nightmarish, claustrophobic purgatory. But more so than Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 drama, The Royal Hotel is interested in digging into the politics of gender, of pervasive male toxicity.

Green has experience on the subject: her previous film, 2019’s The Assistant, took aim at the sexual transgressions of a Harvey Weinstein-esque movie studio executive. Rape culture plays just as big of a role in The Royal Hotel. From the moment the women arrive at the pub, misogyny clots the air like a sporing mould. In their very first interaction, Billy calls Hanna a “smart c***”; later in the film, the pub’s skeezy, almost entirely male clientele come to refer to the by-now repelled bartender as “sour-c***”. Violence is manifested in language, with the danger of physical brutality an ever-present undercurrent. Despite this, Green has spoken about the notes she received from the film’s “finance people” concerning the film’s violent content and the lack of a “boiling point”. Executives are said to have asked, “Where’s the rape scene? Where’s the violence?”, a line of criticism that Green notes was echoed by multiple reviewers. But it’s a vapid complaint. If anything, The Royal Hotel shows that you don’t need to depict rape to make a film that tackles sexual violence unflinchingly.

The threat of sexual violence looms over Green’s film, most overtly in the character of menacing pub regular Dolly (Daniel Henshall). In one of the most chilling sequences, Hanna puts an inebriated Liv to bed in a room above the pub; Dolly appears at the end of the hall. She hurries inside, locks the door, waits. Dolly stands outside; we see his shadow underneath the doorframe. He ultimately walks away, but the danger, the implication, is clear. It’s terrifying stuff, all the more so for how prosaic and plausible the peril is.