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

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.

As a portrait of masculinity, The Royal Hotel is utterly damning; Dolly may be the irredeemable villain of the piece, but even the less overtly sinister men are part of the problem. Matty (Toby Wallace), a brash, jockish twentysomething, enjoys a reciprocated flirtation with Hanna, but things deteriorate after he refuses to take “no” for an answer at the end of a long, boozy night. He eventually relents and leaves in a huff, but for about a minute, the jeopardy of sexual violence is palpable. Then there’s Teeth (James Frecheville), another bar regular who takes a shine to Liv; his propensity for violence never extends to the women, but he is as poisoned by masculinity as the rest of them. The only exception, perhaps, is Baykali Ganambarr’s aboriginal merchant Tommy, who suffers his own indignities among the bar’s mostly white milieu – in his short appearance, we learn Billy has stiffed him out of three months’ pay.

The ethics of depicting sexual assault on screen have been debated at length in recent years. Series like Game of Thrones have come under fire for – so the argument goes – using gratuitous rape scenes as a means of cheap provocation. Even works that tackle sexual assault adultly and progressively, such as 2021’s medieval epic The Last Duel – which dramatised a rape twice, from the point of view of both victim and perpetrator – have faced criticism for depicting it outright; for some people, there is unequivocally no right way to depict rape on screen. It would be reductive to assess The Royal Hotel wholly in light of this discourse, but the idea that a rape scene would have in any way augmented the film’s message is entirely wrong-headed.

Viewers are not idiots. It is unlikely anyone will walk out of The Royal Hotel with any illusions about what the film is saying. If anything, its message is made sharper by the film’s refusal to provide audiences with a “boiling point”. The sexism and intimidation that Hanna and Liv experience at the bar aren’t simply pieces of foreshadowing, a precursor to some greater wrong. They are the wrong. The film isn’t about an act of sexual assault, but about the environments that allow rapists to thrive. And on this, it speaks volumes.

‘The Royal Hotel’ is out now in cinemas