Green Room concerns hardcore punk band The Ain't Rights (Callum Turner, Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat, and Joe Cole), who at the start of the movie are in their van making their way to a gig. The job falls through, but the guy who set it up gets them another gig at a sketchy venue somewhere in the middle of Oregon. The place, as it turns out, is a hangout for a white supremacist group. The band plays the gig, but as they're getting ready to leave, they become witnesses to a murder. They lock themselves into the green room as they attempt to negotiate a peaceful exit. But as time goes on, it becomes painfully clear that the Nazis have no intention of letting them leave alive.
The movie emulates the simple elegance of a John Carpenter siege movie. It sets up a tense situation, establishes the geography, and escalates matters through sudden bursts of brutality. Most of this movie really does take place inside the titular location. The characters have very limited resources, and they're facing a far superior force. At the same time, the bad guys are also limited by their need to stage the circumstances of the violence to follow. This is a smart, punchy movie that is destined to be a classic genre favorite in the years to come.
Simplicity is key here. The film builds a pressure cooker of a situation, and it just lets things play out as they should. With the scope of the action so limited, there's actually room to build up these characters, to make them into something more than just random bodies to be fed to the genre machine. The members of the band are all distinct characters, and the relationships between them are always clear. It makes every bit of violence that much more meaningful, since the film makes it easy to care about the fate of these characters.
But even more interesting is in how the film treats the villains. There is certainly no sympathy given to the ideology to which the bad guys subscribe, but the film does allow them to be more than a faceless bunch of bigots. These aren't just fanatics killing out of hate. They are people trying to protect their own from these outsiders whose very presence threatens their existence. It doesn't make them right, or justify the awfulness that comes from them, but it adds interesting layers to what is otherwise a very straightforward story.
The action plays out elegantly. These are just normal people thrown into extraordinary circumstances, and the film does a great job of displaying the real consequences of violence. No one gets to look cool or particularly tough as they work through this bad situation. But at the same time, no one is making the kind of contrived bad choices that tend to fuel this kind of film. Director Jeremy Saulnier really ratchets up the tension, and at the same time he adds touches that manage to subvert genre expectations. The movie also features a terrific cast, anchored by the late Anton Yelchin, whose inherent soulfulness gives this film an unexpected layer of heart. And Patrick Stewart shows up in a very effective piece of unusual casting.
Green Room is practically a film from another era. It really doesn't feel like we get a lot of films like this anymore, which fall between the bloated horror blockbusters and the no-budget disposable direct-to-video genre films that nobody really wants to watch. This is much closer to a new John Carpenter film than we've gotten in a long while, and it's a welcome addition. It feels like the world has forgotten how great and how important Carpenter's tradition of small, weird, and brutal cinema was and still is. Saulnier looms more than happy to be carrying that torch, and cinema is all the better for it.
My Rating:
