Review: Check into ‘The Royal Hotel’ for well-wrought dread that’s all too familiar to women

The walls are scabbed. Kitty Green’s queasily gripping “The Royal Hotel” is set in a location neither regal nor much of a hotel. A scene from the movie “The Royal Hotel.” It’s a rift that Green works cleverly into the relationship between Liv and Hanna, with Hanna ready to flee from the get-go, while Liv wants to stick it out, minimizing or downplaying the potential threat with the faintest of “chill out” eye-rolls. Although inspired by Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary “Hotel Coolgardie,” “The Royal Hotel” is a more genre-inflected drama than the forensic dissection of #MeToo complicity that was “The Assistant.” But it is similarly single-minded, deriving much of its pressure-cooker tension from the precise re-creation of situations in which we, as spectators, catch ourselves judging Liv and Hanna’s actions. Indeed, there are several other versions of this deceptively smart film that, taking the exact same events from the perspective of Teeth, or Billy or Torsten, the dopey Scando tourist Hanna kissed in Sydney who shows up as a hilariously ineffectual rescuer, would simply play out as some version of “the time those American girls who didn’t know how to have a good time came out here and just couldn’t handle it.” So it goes when the dominant culture is one that regards predatory masculinity as a fact of life, as ungovernable and unalterable as the weather, and puts it on women to constantly be checking the skies to judge whether it’s safe to leave the house.