Director Kitty Green has some worthy documentary subjects under her belt and it’s no surprise that the excellent Hotel Coolgardie (2016) inspired her in this outback noir fictionalisation.

An abandoned pub in South Australia substitutes for Coolgardie’s Denver City Hotel and it is just as isolated in endless stretches of dry red dirt. Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) are US backpackers, pretending to be Canadian because “everyone likes Canadians.” Liv has run out of cash so they are forced to take a job as bartenders at the remote Royal Hotel.

Hanna is pissed off about it from the start and you get the feeling that this isn’t the first time Liv has let her down. Hanna‘s scowl is hard to budge, which doesn’t endear her to the regulars at the ramshackle pub. It’s the kind of place on the edge of ugly violence each night as working men – mostly from the mines – drink too much and feel entitled to women’s bodies.

There are four men who loom large – the alcoholic republican Billy (Hugo Weaving) who drinks more than he works, baby faced Matty (Toby Wallace) who tries to win Hanna over, monosyllabic Teeth (James Frecheville) who makes a play for Liv and Dolly (Daniel Henshell) who smiles and jokes but is psychopathically creepy.

Where Hotel Coolgardie gave us light and shade and some insight into these gauche and violent men, Green fills each scene with so much noise and menace that everything feels like a threat. It would have made a good jumping off point for a horror and for a while I thought (hoped) we might find out that Dolly was systematically abducting the transient bartenders as they finished their stint.

Except for a cathartic 30 seconds at the end (and a great scowl from Hanna) it’s fairly relentlessly grim. If the intended audience is female identifying, it’s 90 minutes of misogyny cranked up to 11 without much to help us understand or navigate it. For blokes, I’m sure none would see themselves in Dolly or Matty or Teeth, although the underlying entitlement and ridicule is the beating heart of patriarchy.

Ultimately whose understanding of the world is changed by this story? My recommendation – watch Hotel Coolgardie.