Films > Film Reviews

Green Room

16/05/16

Jeremy Saulnier’s siege thriller is simple, brutal and for all intents and purposes a horror film. It begins with The Ain’t Rights, a punk band on tour playing tiny shows for minimum cash; in hope of a better pay-off they take a detour into the backwaters of the Pacific Northwest and end up playing in a neo-Nazi clubhouse. A cover of Dead Kennedy’s Nazi Punks Fuck Off is their opening anthem and from there it takes a turn for the worse: they are witnesses to a murder and are locked in a dressing room with Imogen Poots, a seven foot supremacist and a loaded gun. Meanwhile the club’s owner Patrick Stewart is waiting outside trying to reason with the group. It gets gory very quickly, and while these initial scenes of entrapment and bloodshed are pleasantly shocking, the film loses its edge soon after that.

The ordeal is encased in itself, a one-off event (or ‘problem’ as Stewart calls it) in which no one is granted absolution. Is Green Room trying to prove anything? That white supremacists are violent assholes? There’s nothing explicitly race-related (the whole cast appear to be white American), it’s just a nasty little film that revels in its claustrophobia. The supremacists are described by Stewart’s character as a ‘movement’ and his sharp-minded organisation is carried out with composure and menace – the plot is meticulously planned but when it’s over, that’s it. No repercussions for the remaining characters. As it progresses it starts to adopt the tone of classic exploitation revenge horrors, an ‘I Spit on Your Grave’, but with Nazis. Their politics are largely irrelevant, it’s just the group mentality that poses the threat.

The shock of the first half hour that makes this film so engaging to begin with sadly dies out as things become more complex. Characters’ innocence is shoved aside and we are no longer as scared as we once were. Saulnier takes the genre’s narrative and beautifies it; especially in the green room itself it’s shot with incredibly controlled movements, making the place seem larger than it is. Stewart is excellent, pushing against his previous Shakespearean/X-Men roles and into one altogether darker, more calculating. The young ‘uns are good too, but all they do is run and scream. A tense 90 minutes, and a joy for anyone who can spot the many hardcore/punk references.

7/10