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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The Telluride Film Festival, always held over Labor Day Weekend in that gorgeous Colorado town, celebrated fifty years with a dazzling diversity. The twenty films I squeezed into five days ranged from director Tod Browning’s 1927 The Unknown, starring Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford, to writer/director Justine Triet’s intriguing Anatomy of a Fall, this year’s prestigious Cannes Palme d’Or winner.
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Stupendous. A work of domestic gothic grotesquerie of women’s suffocation and sacrifice to the needs of men, always presumed to be more important and more pressing, and of women’s pain and isolation, from the world and from other women who might be their allies, unless we can find a way to overcome the conditioning that tells us that other women are our rivals.
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Made all-the-more timely given the verdict in the sexual misconduct trial of disgraced Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein, Kitty Green’s workplace drama profiles how power enforces silence about sexual coercion and harassment.
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Garner’s riveting performance, the use of ambient office noise instead of a traditional score and Green’s decision to keep Jane’s omnipresent boss unseen – although we do overhear a couple of his threatening, profanity-laced phone calls that she stoically endures – all keep the slow-burn drama smoldering.
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Gird your loins for The Assistant. Be ready for a quiet film that chills you to the bones, kind of like 2018’s The Guilty in its building force. Be ready for a film that explains so much about corporate harassment, about women’s abuse, about silencing victims and whistle-blowers.
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Unlike the overtly melodramatic Bombshell, director and writer Kitty Green’s The Assistant instead offers a more everyday slow-burn alternative to a drama inspired by the #MeToo era. Its greatest asset is a subtle yet deeply felt performance by Julia Garner of Ozark and Grandma fame as a witness to the evil that the Harvey Weinstein monsters of the world do to the women who are under their sway. In contrast to the depiction of the Fox News sex-abuse scandal, this scenario could happen in almost any workplace and is far more relatable.
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Kitty Green was on the Stanford campus in fall 2017, conducting interviews for a documentary about sexual misconduct on college campuses, when news of sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein broke. The Assistant, Green’s feature film about a day in the life of a producer’s assistant, the type of person New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who broke the Weinstein story, characterize as being part of the “complicity machine” that enabled Weinstein’s monstrous behavior for so many years.
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