In The Royal Hotel, a new film by the writer-director Kitty Green, two women run out of money while backpacking through Australia. As a last resort, they begin bartending at a remote, male-dominated mining town in the outback. To prepare for the job and the attention they’re warned they’ll receive, they draw on every lesson they’ve learned about how to stay safe, and maybe even sane, as women. They dress appropriately for the job. They don’t go anywhere without each other. They lock their doors at night. They laugh at bad jokes, smile at unruly patrons, kick out the overly inebriated. They even hide their American identity by claiming to be Canadian.

And yet, for all their efforts, they can’t shake the feeling that something will go wrong. The film draws tension from the pair’s growing uncertainty over their interactions with the men around them—about whether their comments are flirtatious or predatory, whether their gazes are friendly or threatening, whether anyone in the town can be trusted at all, regardless of how they appear.

That dread is exactly what Green felt as she watched Hotel Coolgardie, the 2016 documentary that inspired her film. Hotel Coolgardie, which follows two Finnish backpackers tending a bar in a small Australian town, both confronted and confirmed her fears for the women. The movie ends bleakly, but the backpackers did everything they could to avoid danger—and Green drew on their fortitude for her script. “There is something about the Scandinavian women and their strength and their ability to stand up for themselves and say no that I was attracted to, perhaps because I probably would have just accepted the [men’s] behavior,” Green told me last month when we met in New York.

By adapting their story for The Royal Hotel, Green places her audience directly in the women’s shoes, removing the implied safety of the documentary crew. Hanna (played by Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) are, like the real-life backpackers, entering their new gig knowing they’ll face an unhealthy amount of testosterone and a steep learning curve about their cultural differences. But the real problem is more complicated and troublesome: Because they are outsiders, Hanna and Liv cannot definitively interpret any single conversation or interaction they have.

Everything they are—female and foreign, there to serve alcohol with a smile—plays a pervasive role. The result is a film that understands that Hanna and Liv’s experience does not take place in a vacuum. For young women like them, the film makes clear, some social milieus are impossible to endure without paying a heavy cost.

Green’s first narrative film, 2019’s The Assistant, tracked a mousy employee (Garner, in her first collaboration with Green) working for and cleaning up after an unseen studio executive modeled on Harvey Weinstein. The film’s effectiveness came from the crushing silence of its many dialogue-free scenes, which underlined both Garner’s character’s inability to voice her concerns and the industry’s apathy toward her boss’s misbehavior.

The Royal Hotel, by comparison, is cacophonous because of its pub setting—the noise adds to Hanna and Liv’s disorientation. Green, along with her co-writer, Oscar Redding, tried to replicate the language found inside bars in isolated places—rowdy venues that can be sanctuaries for locals, and petri dishes of miscommunication when visitors arrive. The thoughtless dialogue of its customers took meticulous overthinking to get right. “You want it to feel tacky,” Green explained. “They’re not the smartest guys in the world. They’re not going to have the best insult. They’re going to use the lowest-hanging fruit.”

Sometimes, Green didn’t have to search far for inspiration: One scene, hinging on an order of Dickens Cider (say the words out loud), is pulled straight from her own experience. In Hotel Coolgardie, the women’s Finnish nationality is constantly commented on; for The Royal Hotel, Green wanted to incorporate similarly banal jokes about Hanna being blond. The point, she explained, was for all of the “jokes” to not really be jokes at all, therefore making their intentions unclear. Maybe the speaker just thinks he’s being funny; maybe he really intends to degrade his target. Either way, for Hanna and Liv, resilience is a necessity, and being accommodating is a defense mechanism. They have difficulty figuring out who in their orbit is actually offensive—a familiar feeling to anyone who’s been the mark for a tasteless but potentially harmless comment.

That conundrum is exhausting to parse, because the men surrounding Hanna and Liv are not outright, one-dimensional villains. Their brash boss, Billy (Hugo Weaving), may use coarse language, but the stress of his financial struggle partly accounts for his demeanor. Matty (Toby Wallace), the purveyor of the Dickens Cider joke, can be rather sweet, even inviting the women on a peaceful trip to a watering hole and singing along to Kylie Minogue in the car on the way. Many of the bar’s patrons are just lonely, Green explained, working day in and day out in the middle of nowhere, “desperate for connection [but] failing at every attempt.”

[Read: The Assistant and the messes women clean up]

Hanna and Liv’s disagreements over the men’s aims—not the men themselves—consequently become the story’s driving conflict, and the film wisely declines to pick a side as they debate whether to stay or leave. “Both of them are making choices, and I don’t see either choice being incorrect,” Green said. Hanna, for instance, sees the aggressive and binge-drinking Dolly (Daniel Henshall) as a threat, whereas Liv considers him crude but controllable. Hanna thinks Liv is being too nice, thus inviting more attention from the men; Liv thinks Hanna is too defensive, her obvious mistrust causing only more trouble. The Royal Hotel lays a trap for the viewer to judge the women’s responses rather than question the men’s behavior, just as all of its characters do, including Hanna and Liv. Yes, the women are afraid of what the men might be capable of—but they’re also afraid that they’re overreacting.

By the end, Green’s film invites multiple interpretations. Perhaps Hanna was right all along, and at least one of the men intended to do them harm. Perhaps Liv was correct, and what she and Hanna considered aggressive was just the locals’ idea of a warm welcome. As The Royal Hotel made its way through the festival circuit at Telluride and Toronto, Green noticed deep contrasts among audience reactions, depending on their cultural background. Australian viewers, she told me, considered the men on-screen “really kind and warm,” whereas American viewers felt dramatically differently. “I screened it here [in America] for some friends,” she said, “and they were like, as soon as Hugo Weaving arrives, ‘He’s deranged. The place is crazy.’”

The one constant among anyone watching is an expectation that the protagonists are doomed—the same sense of dread Green had watching Hotel Coolgardie, her source material. The Royal Hotel is not so much a portrait of gender dynamics as it is a dissection of that latent, sometimes paralyzing fear felt by any woman on the receiving end of unwanted attention. But the film is also an invitation to consider the source of that fear, and Green has frequently heard one question from viewers. “I get a lot of ‘Is this film about masculinity?’” she told me with a sigh. “And I’m like, ‘Where do I begin?’”