Green Room, 2016.
Written and Directed By Jeremy Saulnier.
Starring Patrick Stewart, Imogen Poots, Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat, Callam Turner, Marc Weber, Macon Blair, and Joe Cole.
SYNOPSIS:
After witnessing a murder, a punk rock band is forced into a vicious fight for survival against a group of maniacal skinheads.
Green Room is that rare breed of action-thriller (it could also be classified as close quarters survival horror) containing characters with actual depth. The movie is really nothing more than a young punk rock band holed up in the namesake room at a concert venue (as the synopsis mentions, they have seen something they shouldn’t, but the reasoning goes slightly further than that) against the nasty Neo-Nazis that run the joint. Now naturally, it isn’t very challenging for a filmmaker (writer/director Jeremy Saulnier of independent hit Blue Ruin fame) to make an audience hate such a despicable group, but getting viewers invested in the survival of a bunch of random hoodlums from the punk rock scene is again, the real success.
None of the band members come across as archetypes here to fit a checklist. There’s even a sense that the females that are part of the cast aren’t superfluous tokenism. It also helps that the rockers aren’t wholly stupid as many other characters in the genre tend to be. This doesn’t mean they are deep thinking citizens musing about life that will make you see the world differently or anything, just that the people feel incredibly grounded in reality, and don’t deserve to have their lives taken from the situation they have found themselves in. Furthermore, Green Room wouldn’t work without having these characters successfully realized.
Having Patrick Stewart play a menacing Neo-Nazi that rarely loses his composure (and is highly methodical in his plans to cover up the unwanted situation he finds his group in) certainly helps, but even more so is that behind all of the bloodshed and gore are characters (on both sides) using their wits in hopes of gaining the upper hand. For a movie where a small group of people are trapped in one room for a great duration of the running time, Saulnier consistently finds ways to keep the film moving at a lightning quick pace, never giving audiences a moment to cease fearing for the safety of the good guys.
Dousing all of this violence into the punk rock scene also gives Green Room a highly aggressive and distinct stylistic edge that perfectly parallels some of the more disturbing moments of death. Simple sound effects such as the deafening and annoying feedback from a microphone hooked up to a sound system heighten the palpable intensity. Realistically, most of the heavy music is here for no other reason other than Saulnier is personally connected to the punk rock scene, and finds its presence awesome (which is perfectly fine), but how he keeps it permeated into the atmosphere is a masterful accomplishment, and what really makes the movie stand out.
Coming back to the characters though, they do begin to drop like flies, and like everything else in the movie, it is carefully handled to maximize effect. Green Room doesn’t build up specific characters for a grand death, but rather just kills many of them off unexpectedly and with a degree of randomness. Part of this is due to that, for what seems like the first half of the movie, it’s somewhat hard to tell who is the ultimate protagonist of the group, which works for the best, as it is unclear who is safe and who isn’t from a predictability perspective. When someone dies, you won’t see it coming, and by the way, it will be very violent (but never gratuitous). Quite a few deaths will live on in your memory for a while thanks to both emotional impact and stellar cinematography (there’s a moment where one important antagonist eats a bullet while managing to fire off a round himself, leaving you cheering that another sinister human being has bitten the dust, while simultaneously praying that the heroes also didn’t meet their demise).
It also needs to be mentioned one more time that Patrick Stewart is flat-out awesome in the role of a Neo-Nazi, and will undoubtedly be the selling point of Green Room. Saulnier hands him a role that hides some of the more technical details about what the character is doing and exactly how he is doing it, with Stewart using that mystery to his advantage to create a downright terrifying human being that is both evil on the surface and inside. Heroes need good villains, and a Neo-Nazi played by Patrick Stewart certainly fits the bill.
Saying anything more about Green Room would be a disservice to anyone potentially planning on checking the excellently crafted thriller out. Go into it with as little knowledge as possible and get sucked away into the gritty environment on display (the concert venue itself is littered with graffiti alluding to Hitler, Confederacy, white supremacy, and other ugly sides of human nature), watching punk rockers and Neo-Nazis duke it out, getting killed off one by one. It is one of the best movies of 2016 so far, and will indisputably be one of the most intense all year.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder – Chief Film Critic of Flickering Myth. Check here for new reviews weekly, friend me on Facebook, follow my Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com
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Originally published April 8, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
