Green Room
The easiest way to describe Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room is John Carpenter’s 1976 Assault On Precinct 13, but with besieged punks instead of besieged cops. When hardcore quartet the Ain’t Rights see something they shouldn’t have while backstage after a show, the venue’s neo-Nazi owners (led by a growling, simmering Patrick Stewart) trap them in — yes — the green room. The skinheads put a scarily efficient plan into place to get rid of the band, who are busy trying to find a way out. Not all of them make it.
Saulnier takes his time getting to the action. The first few reels are a quiet, keenly observed portrait of a broke touring band, shot in bleary shallow focus. Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development), Anton Yelchin (Star Trek), Joe Cole (Secret in Their Eyes), and Callum Turner (Queen and Country) play the Ain’t Rights, and they have a natural chemistry together. When they sit down for an interview with a 'zinester, their banter is equal parts shit-talking and shorthand intimacy.
The character work pays off once shit hits the fan. There are many ways to invest an audience in a protagonist’s fate: Make them “likeable,” or make them magnetically repulsive, or make them believable within the film’s world. Green Room chooses the last option. The punks-vs-neo-Nazis thing isn’t used to draw easy good-evil lines. There’s no real evidence that the Ain’t Rights are particularly political; they antagonize the skinheads in the pit by playing the Dead Kennedy’s Nazi Punks Fuck Off, but it’s more of a provocation than a statement.
And on the flip side, the skinheads are humanized just enough to complicate the film’s subtext. There’s nothing heady about Green Room, which comes as a relief. Saulnier’s previous film Blue Ruin (2013) strained at its genre confines in awkward ways; Green Room easily integrates all Saulnier’s myriad cinephile influences into a streamlined siege movie. It’s as at ease with executing box-cutter disembowelings as it is with observing the verdant morning light of the Pacific Northwest.
This isn’t to say that Saulnier’s script isn’t obvious at times. He strings out two recurring, unfinished exchanges — one involving a pitched paintball game and the other the question “what’s your desert island band?” — until their completion feels, more than anything, inevitable. A similar moment involving an attack dog plays much better. The shock of Patrick Stewart saying the n-word is the film’s cheapest moment, and precipitating as it does the relatively flat climax it can’t help but stand out as a mistake.
However, Saulnier’s handle on his milieu and DP Sean Porter’s (Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter) careful shooting make for a potent hit of action. Green Room is a vicious little movie that confidently deploys Tom Savini levels of gore and a wicked sense of humor: see the scene that cheekily couples the chorus of Slayer’s War Ensemble (“It’s how many people I can kill”) over a murder, or the way the narrative twists one character’s description of live music as “time and aggression” in perverse fashion. If you have any love in your heart for splatter, riffs, or Docs, this is your movie.
This article appears in Apr 28 – May 4, 2016.