The filmmaker runs a tight ship; all her elements build up to some of the most believably tense moments you’d see in a lean thriller like this one.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 10, 2025

The Royal Hotel is a well told, if slightly chilling yarn, rough justice providing a satisfying ending.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 9, 2025

The Royal Hotel doesn’t really say anything new, but it says it in such a restrained yet effective way that you can still get a new experience out of it.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 3, 2024

The discomforting nature of its delivery may divide certain audiences, but the observations it makes in regards to male behaviour is as powerful as it is maddening to those who recall similar experiences.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 19, 2024

with two narrative features under her belt, both as striking and as sharp as a shattered whisky bottle, Green is a filmmaker one should take notice of...a thriller where respect is more scarce than water in the drought-ridden town

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 4, 2024

While cleverly giving the story a crowd-pleasing finale, Aussie director and co-writer Kitty Green’s take just never quite engenders the same sense of voyeurism – or nausea – that made the documentary Hotel Coolgardie such unforgettable viewing.

| Apr 28, 2024

While not a complex story, it is developed with Kitty Green's firm hand, who draws a persuasive atmosphere from the main setting... [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 19, 2024

Kitty Green successfully directs a thriller that confuses and surprises, is suffocating as well as refreshing, and has a very outstanding performance by Julia Garner. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 12, 2024

The Royal Hotel constantly flirts with the 'rape and revenge' genre but never crosses that line. And that is quite fortuitous. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 12, 2024

This small, isolated society is delicately balanced on the cliff edge of a canyon of chaos. When it finally falls off, it is not unexpected, but, even so, the final events are not what I was expecting.

| Original Score: C+ | Jan 27, 2024

As a whole, the film feels a bit undercooked, but even if the energy is heightened, scenes remain grounded in edgy realism.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 16, 2024

It's a thriller about female safety and empowerment.

| Original Score: 3 stars | Dec 29, 2023

A movie which marinates in misogynist threat like many a thriller, but without the usual familiar genre touchstones.

| Dec 26, 2023

We get a rather disconcertingly janky ending which feels like a ninety-minute non-sequitur, especially after hinting at something tangible, some reveal or purpose.

| Original Score: C- | Dec 10, 2023

‘…as dingy and off-putting at the building itself, The Royal Hotel is no-one’s favourite film, but it does what The Assistant does, by crystallising a female POV that’s too often been the starting point for a narrative about male heroism or revenge….’

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 7, 2023

While it may not conclude on the strongest note, Green creates an environment that gets more physically and psychologically perilous from our protagonists while steadily getting more unnerving for us.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 6, 2023

It's no Wake in Fright, but that's hardly a criticism.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 28, 2023

The balance between realism and abstraction isn’t maintained quite until the end, which is effective in its way, but less than a fully convincing resolution to what has come before.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 27, 2023

It is the women’s slow disintegration from with-it to without-a-clue that draws the clinical focus of filmmaker Kitty Green (The Assistant), and results in a solid number of powerfully uneasy scenes.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 27, 2023

The Royal Hotel, for the most part, is a gripping, tense Thriller that shines when exploring the dynamics of its two flawed characters and their response to their predicament.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 25, 2023