A retelling of the events of 'Hotel Coolgardie', the dizzying thriller drops Julia Garner and Jessica Fenwick in a country Australian pub where the beer is cold and tempers are hot.
"The Royal Hotel," the setting for Kitty Green's ulcerous thriller, is a sunny bar in a rural Australian mining town surrounded by terrain so monotonous that Canadian backpackers Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) can't keep up. eyes open upon entering. The two young women arrive at their jobs as waitresses with a palpable feeling of disorientation. They have literally woken up in Oz and don't know the people, the customs, the nicknames of the local beers or the way out.
Director: Kitty Green
Writers: Kitty Green, Oscar Redding
Stars: Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, Herbert Nordrum
The clients are, as expected, gruff and girl-hungry. (The sign on the board announcing your first shift says: “Fresh meat.”) Hanna and Liv are ready for that. They're not idiots, even if their knowledge of Australia is pretty much limited to Fosters beer and kangaroos. Still, Green, an enthusiastic and fierce talent, puts them, and us, through hell.
Worst part? This setting is true. Green and her co-writer Oscar Redding (a true Australian) based the script on Pete Gleeson's 2016 documentary “Hotel Coolgardie,” named for this desolate stretch of land where #MeToo has yet to reach. The documentary followed the miseries of two Finnish girls, one of whom never recovered from work. This fictional adaptation modifies the names of the characters (goodbye “Canman”, hello “Teeth”) and renounces the cinematic neutrality of the original. However, he keeps a second pair of waitresses who have become too adapted to his circumstances: think Christopher Walken in “The Deer Hunter.”
Green knows audiences expect an outback horror movie (has this region ever produced a romantic comedy?), so he delivers every one of the genre's conventions: desolate landscapes, eerie silence, giant snakes, endless black skies. and, above all, Ultimately, the terrible fear that no one will come to help. (The moody cinematography is by Michael Latham.) Hanna and Liv study the men to find out who they can trust when the city's incel frustrations explode. The pub's owner, Billy (a fully immersed Hugo Weaving), is an obvious scoundrel. Of the clientele, Teeth (James Frecheville) is polite but possessive. Matty (Toby Wallace) is a slippery joker. Dolly (Daniel Henshall) is a bad drunk. Even a visiting Swede (Herbert Nordrum) who made out with Hanna in Sydney seems to put more energy into trying to impress the guys. The dating pool is essential.
There's a way these movies usually play out: a sexual attack and then a bloody, vengeful catharsis. Green uses our anticipation to his advantage. He makes us look for danger in every scene, and we usually find it. The director is using this bar as a terrarium for a toxic dynamic that exists, well, everywhere. She has brought us here, to this extremely specific place, to sharpen our awareness of the smallest red flags flying around the world.
Henwick's Liv, the more relaxed of the pair, tends to ignore the little things. Billy only calls them the C-word because, as Liv explains, "it's a cultural thing." Hanna, played with attentive intensity by Garner, is more alert, in part because she is more likely to be sober, or at least not to pass out drunk. As in her last film with Green, “The Assistant,” an almost zoological study of what it would have been like to work for Harvey Weinstein, Garner has a gift for revealing the inner turmoil of a character who rarely feels safe enough to say exactly what what is it. she thinks. One of the movie's smartest moments comes when Liv tries to cheer up her best friend with empty feminist platitudes and Hanna finally snaps. "No I'm not!" She explodes. “I'm weak, I'm afraid and I want to go home!”
The actors recognize that managing a drunken room is performance. The tips depend on knowing when to flirt and when to frown. When all the drunks are bigger than you (one of the male actors is 6'11", a foot and a half taller than any of the female leads), the job feels more like a tightrope improv on a tank of sharks. . Time and time again, we, the audience, find ourselves wanting to shout advice at the screen like we would in a normal horror movie: laugh at that joke, don't laugh at that one, and for the love of God, stop take shots When we stop to examine our own reactions, Green's most serious point hits us. Why are we micromanaging the victims?
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