When I posted my rewatch review of Psycho, I banged on about Roger Ebert’s old adage that movies are machines for empathy. Never has that been more true than in The Royal Hotel… a movie that feels aimless and had me waiting for the story to start. Until I realized this WAS the point and my concern for the main characters was the movie.

The Royal Hotel is about two Canadian girls on a party vacation in Australia. They run out of money and take a job in a hotel/bar in a rowdy mining town in the outback.

These girls shouldn’t be there… no woman should be there, but most definitely not these slight young ladies who are surely going to set off one of these beer-basted bastards at the bar. And that’s the movie.

I was waiting for the shoe to drop… for the big Hollywood moment. An attack, revenge, guns drawn… or maybe something more like a journey of self-discovery, wisdom gained during walkabout. But the movie refused to be about anything more than the small situations and chaotic nights. I grew impatient and annoyed and was planning on giving the movie a relatively low score. Not bad, but just on the cusp.

But then the lightbulb hit… that I felt danger for these women every minute of the film, felt frustrated that they didn’t walk away, that they took foolish risks around these roughnecks… that’s when I got the movie. I understood what it was doing. It had put me in their boots.

It says what it says without a lecture. Yes this is a movie about men behaving badly but it never says it out loud. You observe.

I’m not sure I’d sit through this movie again and my rating doesn’t really reflects how I felt in the moment. It does reflect my admiration for what they pulled off. And it reflects how I felt in the final moments where, yeah, they did the right thing. Symbolically if not practically.

Score: 85