Female Film Critics 24/375
Consider the desperation, courage, and naiveté prompting two young American friends, Hanna and Liv, to accept a job bartending at the completely misnamed Royal Hotel, located in a remote Australian Outback mining town. As backpacking tourists in Sydney without any viable options, they certainly need the money. However, Hanna and Liv fail utterly to anticipate the clientele, to their dismay.
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Australian director Kitty Green’s second narrative feature The Royal Hotel is a wholly unnerving and totally engrossing thriller. Atmospheric and all too realistic, it’s the kind of story that sticks with you long after the credits have rolled. The film is paced to perfection and each and every well-planned element is woven expertly together to build layers upon layers of truly discomforting suspense. With Green’s keen eye the film becomes a riveting exploration of isolation and what it truly feels like to be a young woman in the world. It helps too that Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick nail their characters.
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Australian filmmaker Kitty Green delves into the war between men and women in The Royal Hotel, a film about two young backpackers who take barmaid jobs in a mining area in Australia’s isolated outback. How they fare in an environment drenched in testosterone and alcohol is an edge-of-your-seat psychological thriller about gender dynamics. Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick star in The Royal Hotel as the tourists who take pub jobs to top up their holiday fund. The Royal Hotel is about systemic issues, says Green, “about drinking culture and women feeling threatened in certain spaces.
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This Is Going to Be Big is a privilege to watch. To be immersed in the world of the spunky and talented teens who go through complex and difficult moments, but each emerge with a reason to be undeniably proud. Hyland’s documentary is bottled joy. It is a documentary about a fostering and thoughtful community. It might even turn the cynical viewer into a fan of Australian music legend John Farnham.
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Alice Maio Mackay as a filmmaker brings so much fundamental joy to her movies. There’s an old school punk rock spirit here of finding joy in the bleak mess of it all, and perhaps nowhere else in her work is that joy more vivid than Satranic Panic – bright, eye-popping jewel colors explode on a screen further electrified by her meshing of the traditional horror film format with that of the musical. Mackay simply delights in Satranic Panic’s musical numbers – clearly as much as she does the more gruesome horror vignettes – and it is this sense of glee that render her films so effortlessly charming. A bright light in a dark world, Satranic Panic is another welcome addition to this astonishing young filmmaker’s growing oeuvre.
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Australian siblings Dan and Dominique Angeloro, the video artist duo better known as Soda Jerk, has brought a bizarre and bracing new political satire to audiences with their film Hello Dankness. It is an assemblage or collage of narrative films, news footage, and clips from various media that tells the crazy story of American politics in the last few years. Created through sampling clips, gonzo editing, and by adding dubbed-in dialogue, the resulting hour and a bit of film feels like the intersection of experimental video art, documentary filmmaking, guerrilla activism, and cultural commentary, if it were built by the hands of filmmakers who were, as they say, seriously tripping balls.
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Writer/director John Curran’s Australian psychological thriller Mercy Road could be euphemistically be described as being too clever for its own good but that presumes the film is in any manner as clever as it is attempting to be. It’s filled with twists, turns, unanswered questions, dark mysteries… all elements that would add up to creating some audience engagement in a better film, but Curran’s work in almost every aspect of the film is sloppy and ill considered.
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Possession in 9/10th’s of Talk to Me, the debut feature film from YouTube video sensations Danny and Michael Philippou. The Australian horror thriller makes The Exorcist look like a dark comedy. Talk to Me is about a parlor game gone wild. A group of high school classmates discover they can bring back the dead by grasping an embalmed hand and inviting the spirits into their body. Ouija boards are so 20th century.
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If you’ve been intrigued by Sarah Snook as sly Shiv Roy on HBO’s Succession, you may find it interesting to see how she tackles a very different role in this Australian psychological thriller. She plays Sarah, a fertility doctor, raising her daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre) as a single mother in suburban Melbourne. Ever since her seventh birthday when she ‘rescued’ a white rabbit, precocious Mia seems to be acting strangely and attentive Sarah cannot figure out why there’s been such a change in her behavior.
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Run Rabbit Run is a clumsy attempt to capture maternal anxiety and the Gothic without fully fleshing out mood and atmosphere required and underwriting the protagonist (and ironically over-writing her in places). Run Rabbit Run could have benefitted from a tighter and more precise screenplay but instead meanders to an unsatisfactory conclusion that audiences most likely predicted before it happened, rendering the chill of it lukewarm at best.
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