Green Room

Green Room is a slick, nasty little piece of work. That’s a compliment, I assure you, considering the genre and moral universe this film occupies. It is undoubtedly not for everyone, but for certain audiences—grindhouse horror fans, cult film connoisseurs, or any angry viewer looking to purge a little tenseness and bloodlust—this is a cinematic gold nugget, a movie to seek out and enjoy with a like-minded crowd.

The unfortunate protagonists of this horrific ride are The Ain’t Rights (Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole, and Callum Turner), a punk rock outfit eking out a hand-to-mouth existence on the road. They've manage to land the worst gig imaginable: a dive venue and gathering place for a neo-Nazi gang in the backwoods of Oregon. The group’s performance goes off without much incident, until one member unwittingly witnesses a murder backstage. As a result, the band, along with a friend of the victim (Imogen Poots), are held hostage in the club’s green room, in a situation there appears to be no way out of. Well, no peaceful or pretty way, anyway.

There’s a rough-around-the-edges look to the production, befitting the punk rock element of the story and the unceasing tone equally. The violence is pretty stark (I’ll just say that dialogue specifically lists guns as out of the question, limiting the killing to messier means). Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier certainly gets the most out of the limited space in which the mayhem unfolds. At times, the enclosed eponymous room creates a claustrophobia so suffocating you almost feel like the tension’s going to burst, in a sense both figurative and inexplicably physical. In other scenes, cramped, dank hallways seem like paralyzing chasms, full of terrors unknown.

What’s most effective, though, is that despite choosing villains so simple to root against, the film doesn’t simply make them faceless cannon fodder (or sharp thing fodder in this case) or caricature. The antagonists all seem like real, bad dudes you could run into in real life, and are scarier for it (sometimes more so when you’re waiting for something to happen than when it’s happening). They’re so effective that one of the movie’s selling points, Patrick Stewart taking a villainous role, almost seems a little out of place, his mannered, more written and fleshed-out ringleader clashing with the rawly terrifying hoodlums in his service. That said, it is interesting to see the veteran lend his refined gravitas to a force of evil.

That character realism works both ways. The rockers being held prisoner are terrified as any normal person would be, which only ups the tension for the viewer. All attempts at movie heroism are swiftly, sometimes bloodily put in their place by the circumstances. And when the film employs one of those corny recurring dialogue motifs as a narrative thread, it’s rudely rebuffed, a finger in the eye of cliché that’s totally appropriate and totally punk. It even elicits a hearty laugh, all the more cathartic because such sentiment is so rare in a picture this unforgiving. 

Green Room is cheap thrills as art, like going out to an all-night dive to satisfy your midnight munchies and unexpectedly getting something close to gourmet. I’ll stress that it’s a dish with a very specific taste; in fact, I’d imagine on many a pallet it would go down like a shot of arsenic. Those with the taste and stomach for this sort of concoction (and you know if you are), on the other hand, will gobble it up.