News of Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel had me excited.  Previously impressing me with her strengths as a documentarian with Ukraine Is Not a Brothel, Green would be drawing inspiration from another documentary that I really admired – 2016’s Hotel Coolgardie.

Pete Gleeson’s doc about a pair of backpackers who grab bartending gigs at a scuzzy pub offered scathing fly-on-the-wall insight to toxic masculinity and abuse in the workplace – it was practically a horror movie.  Hotel Coolgardie became softer as the leading women discovered more about the men that hang off of them, though these developments didn’t excuse the tacky, intimidating behaviour from the chauvinistic patrons.

The existing material seemed like a good wheelhouse for Kitty Green to work with, a disciplined writer/director who conveyed similar danger in her workplace drama The Assistant.  Unfortunately, Green uses her sophomore feature to practically reenact Hotel Coolgradie, as if to put more of a dramatic emphasis on the misogyny the doc highlighted so well.  The additional characterization, provided by screenwriters Green and Oscar Redding, doesn’t provide anything noteworthy that elaborates on the flawed locals, and the ending feels ripped out of a trashy exploitation throwback.

The performances are good, however, with an unrecognizable Hugo Weaving (The Matrix series, Hacksaw Ridge) being the standout as the pub’s surly owner.  Jessica Henwick (Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery) and Julia Garner (reuniting with Green after starring in The Assistant) are strong as well, playing the lead bartenders and showing different degrees of desperation and fear before finding differences on how they handle the pub’s rowdy clientele.

The Royal Hotel may hit differently for those unfamiliar with Gleeson’s documentary.  But, reader, as much as I tried to disassociate the movies from each other, The Royal Hotel made me just want to watch the better version of this story.

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Addison Wylie: @AddisonWylie