Green Room

Synopsis: Pat (Anton Yelchin), Sam (Alia Shawkat), Reece (Joe Cole), and Tiger (Callum Turner) are members of the down-on-its-luck punk band ‘The Ain't Rights’. Desperate for money, they get a tip from Tad (David W Thompson), a small time radio host, who sets them up for a gig in an isolated, backwoods bar that turns out to be home base for a vicious group of white supremacists. When they accidentally discover that a murder has taken place, they barricade themselves in the green room while the bar’s owner, Darcy (Patrick Stewart) tries to come up with a plan for their accidental deaths.

My knuckles are still white after watching this suspenseful, well-crafted and darkly funny slasher-cum-thriller film. So many instances of this genre rely on unmotivated or inexplicable brutality to hook in an audience without understanding that it takes a strong story, well-defined characters, and a real purpose behind the gruesome acts for this kind of work to have more than a fleetingly superficial impact.

The Coen brothers understood this from their first film, Blood Simple (1984) and Jeremy Saulnier seems to be treading the same path. He too understood the genre from his debut film, Murder Party (2007) which, whilst the weakest of his three features to date, still underpinned its parodic levels of violence with a strong sense of reason – in that case, a healthy cynicism about the New York art scene and the wankers you might find in it. That context enabled the audience to appreciate what lay behind the acts of violence rather than simply experiencing than their rendering. His second film, Blue Ruin (2013) placed an even more layered story behind the violence and, whilst it has less of the black humour that is the hallmark of the first film and also a strong element of his latest, it still managed to be compelling and entertaining without any exploitation.

With Green Room, it feels like Saulnier has put everything he’s learned into its making. At 95 minutes, it has pretty much the same running time as his first two movies but feels fuller and more complex in its storytelling and characterisation. The idea of a punk group who sing songs that are violent, angry and anti-establishment suddenly finding themselves pitted against the real thing is such a clever conceit for this kind of movie.

Of course, the terrific performances help too. Yelchin carries off the difficult task of making us laugh and recoil almost in the same moment and Imogen Poots as Amber, the not-so-innocent bystander is a good match for him. Macon Blair, who featured in Murder Party and was so good as the star of Blue Ruin is outstanding again as the second-in-command of a very nasty group of fascist skinheads. But it’s the casting of Patrick Stewart in the villain role that is the real coup with him lending a confidence and authority to his character that makes him all the more terrifying.

Green Room is not a film for squeamish or the faint-hearted. The violence and the culture that lies behind it is often disturbing and the special make-up effects by Joe Badiali and prosthetics by Michael Fontaine are gruesomely realistic, although always driven by the taut narrative and so avoiding the tendency of slasher films to indulge in mere sensationalism. Of course, that’s only an issue when inferior writers and directors are in control of the film and there’s no denying that Saulnier’s take on this much-abused genre gets more and more interesting with every film he makes.

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