Julia Garner needs no assistance leading a chilling thriller.
The “Ozark” breakout star reunites with her “The Assistant” writer/director Kitty Green for Neon’s “The Royal Hotel.”
Per the official synopsis, Americans Hanna (Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) are best friends backpacking in Australia. After they run out of money, Liv, looking for an adventure, convinces Hanna to take a temporary live-in job behind the bar of a pub called The Royal Hotel in a remote Outback mining town. Bar owner Billy (Hugo Weaving) and a host of locals give the girls a riotous introduction to Down Under drinking culture but soon Hanna and Livy find themselves trapped in an unnerving situation that grows rapidly out of their control.
Toby Wallace, Ursula Yovich, Daniel Henshall, James Frecheville, and Herbert Nordrum also star. “The Royal Hotel” premiered at Telluride and is produced by lain Canning, Emile Sherman, Liz Watts, and Kath Shelper.
IndieWire’s David Ehrlich wrote in his review of the Western-inspired Outback thriller that Green crafted “another masterfully constructed pressure cooker about the perils of being a woman on planet Earth.”
Filmmaker Green co-wrote the film with Oscar Redding. Green made her feature debut with 2019’s #MeToo drama “The Assistant,” with Garner playing a secretary to an abusive producer modeled after Harvey Weinstein.
“I was very conscious of when I was reading the press surrounding the #MeToo movement that it was focused on the men, the predators, and not on the issue of how we can get more women into the film industry and how to make workplaces more safe and equitable,” Green told IndieWire at the time. “That became my focus. We knew what’s going on behind that door, that’s been reported, but what we don’t know is the machinery that’s going on outside that door and the culture surrounding silence, the toxic work environment. In scripting it, it was about showing all these little moments that strip a woman of her self-confidence, that could leave a woman unsure of herself and without a path upwards or forward.”
“The Royal Hotel” premieres October 6 in theaters. Check out the trailer below.
