The last time director Kitty Green and actor Julia Garner entertained us, it was with a clammy study of malevolent male power in the entertainment industry. In The Assistant, Garner played the titular factotum to a faceless Weinsteinian indie producer whose proclivity for ingenues wasn’t very secret. Garner’s assistant wasn’t subjected to her boss’s attentions, but the guilt she felt being a party to his debauched appetites undermined everything about her relationship to a job she once thought was a godsend. In Green’s latest film, Garner plays Hannah, a young Canadian woman vacationing in Australia with her BF Liv (Jessica Henwick). When they run out of money, seemingly unexpectedly, they are partying as heartily as the trio of girls in the similarly-themed How to Have Sex, and one gets the impression that Hannah and Liv are just having too good a time to pay enough attention to their credit limit. They are reduced to applying for jobs with the holiday work exchange program and are assigned to an Outback hotel where the same kind of male-dominant assholery prevails as it did in the NYC office of The Assistant, only that nobody at the Royal Hotel keeps their assholery a secret.

Though the idea is just to make enough money to get back to Sydney and resume partying, circumstances, not to mention the debased clientele of the Royal, conspire to make it difficult for the two women to get out, and as in a classic horror film, the development focuses on an ever-burgeoning dread of violence that each protagonist faces differently. Liv seems to be the kind of employee who takes her work at face value, and since most of this work involves serving drinks to lower caste laborers whose attitude is that the customer is always right, she has to put up with a lot of coarse sexual innuendo and unmediated drunken behavior. Hannah, on the other hand, won’t have any of it, and while she’s fairly good at keeping her head, she won’t hesitate to tell off a gob who suggests that what she really needs is a good shag. Though the pair were warned even by their work consultant about the behavior in this stretch of desert, they really don’t understand the extent of the depravity until they arrive and find one of the English women they’re replacing being done doggystyle in their bedroom by a patron. They laugh at the sight but it’s clear they have been warned what they’re in for.

Green is thorough enough to show us why the guys act the way they do, and while the socioeconomic exploitation of these uneducated slobs is handled as boilerplate conflict-creation by the director, she gets sufficient emotional mileage out of the contrasts she sets up, especially with Matty (Toby Wallace), a customer whose attraction to Hannah is reciprocated with halting sympathy; Dolly (Daniel Henshall), a true menace whose sense of grievous resentment of his bosses and betters translates as misogyny of the purest kind; and Billy (Hugo Weaving), the alcoholic owner of the hotel who hates that he has something temperamentally in common with the men he serves. As terrible as these and other men can be in the movie, they, as well as the few women on the scene, don’t necessarily deserve the fate to which Hannah and Liv subject them in the end. They can always go back to Canada. These poor sods are lifers. 

Opens July 26 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

The Royal Hotel home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Hannah & Liv Holdings Pty., Ltd., Screen Australia, and Create NSW