‘Green Room’ (2016) ****/*****
The waiting is the hardest part, aside from all the killing
Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier is best known for last year’s breakout indie hit Blue Ruin, which caught a lot of people’s attention for being a gritty, brutal, disturbingly violent thriller that elevated itself above its exploitation roots by focusing heavily on performance and character. Those who have reached back into his catalogue and also watched his 2007 film Murder Party know that grit and brutality aren’t the only tricks he has up his sleeve though. He’s also able to pair disturbing ultra-violence with a tone of deranged fun and a smattering of dark humor. His latest film, Green Room, takes all of that good stuff and combines it into some sort of giant, Jeremy Saulnier extravaganza. This thing is gritty, it’s disturbing, it’s thrilling, it’s pitch-black hilarious, it’s full of memorable characters and first-rate performances, and it’s pretty much guaranteed to be one of the best times you have in a movie theater this year.
The story told is fairly simple. A struggling punk band embarking on a bare bones tour takes a shady gig at a skinhead compound because they’re in need of some extra scratch. Their set goes well, and it seems like a potentially dangerous situation in a seriously strange environment is going to turn out to be a quick in and out affair, but right before the group of plucky young musicians (Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole, and Callum Turner) leave, they stumble across something they’re not supposed to see and they wind up holed up in the venue’s green room with only a locked door and a single hand gun separating them from a whole gang of bald racists with attack dogs, machetes, and shot guns, who are intent on slaughtering them wholesale. You never know exactly what’s going on or why, you just know that the situation is escalating so quickly that any opportunity to catch their breath would be deadly for our protagonists, so as a viewer it’s your job to do your best to keep up with the story and try not to freak out too much once things start getting grizzly.
The thing that first strikes you about Green Room is how good it is at establishing its world and setting a mood. If you had the sort of misguided youth that led to you spending time in some kind of underground music scene, then you can tell right away just how authentic the tour van our protagonists sputter around in, the random apartments they crash on the floor of, and the rundown venues they load their equipment in and out of are — and how authentic the characters they encounter in each of these locations are as well. Because the people and places of the film feel completely real, by the time it introduces its threat, that feels completely real too. These random garages and empty storefronts where punk shows are thrown exist as the modern spaces where malcontent youth come together in search of direction and identity, and it’s easy to imagine some enterprising psychopath taking advantage of the scene to grow a criminal empire, or even a cult-like following. As soon as our band of punks enter into the remote, skinhead compound where they’re supposed to play their music to a crowd of angry, drunk doofuses who are jacked up on hate and adrenaline, there’s an air of danger and dread that floats over everything, and things just get increasingly worse from that point on.
That escalation of danger and violence is Green Room’s bread and butter. You go from, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” straight into, “Oh god! They just hacked his arm to pieces with a machete,” and from that point forward the film’s momentum never slows up, even a skosh. Part of the reason the breakneck pace is able to be maintained is that the film only runs 93 minutes, so it doesn’t waste any time giving you more story than you need to hear or telling you more than you need to know about the characters. All you need to know is that there are these people over here that you like, these people over here that you hate, and oh-my-god-they’ve-started-murdering-each-other-in-splattery-violent-ways. The brevity allows the film to maintain an air of mystery too. You don’t need to know the history of this violent hate group, or the extent of what their operations are, you just need to know that they’re dangerous, and that the peril our adorable little punks are in is immediate. To show or tell too much would risk diminishing the fear of the unknown that permeates every frame of the film. It’s like not having Jaws pop out of the water until the very end.
Great performances have been a hallmark of Saulnier’s work so far, and Green Room keeps that streak going. Really, there isn’t a weak performance in the film, and while it’s especially nice to see indie regulars like Shawkat, Mark Webber, and Macon Blair add their always solid screen personas to the mix, there were three actors who stood out to me in particular. Yelchin has a likability and a vulnerability that always makes him a great protagonist, but he’s put to especially good use as the de facto leader of the victims here because his character is given such a large distance to travel from where he begins to where he ends that he’s able to show off even more versatility than normal. Imogen Poots plays a character who gets mixed up in the middle of the conflict — one who goes from damsel in distress to damsel of destruction — and the rebel spirit she exhibits over the course of the film is guaranteed to make a lot of audience members cheer, and likely to inspire an Imogen Poots tattoo or two, once enough impressionable young folk get to see the film. Patrick Stewart is playing a bit against type as the leader of the racist skinheads, and it’s just amazing how much weight and gravity his mere presence is able to lend to every single scene he appears in. This guy is respected by everyone, so he brings an authoritarian presence with him, and as soon as he shows up in the movie you know that things have gotten irreparably FUBAR.
Green Room isn’t going to be for everybody — it’s a little too punk rock in its approach for that — but the right people are really going to get what it’s doing, and they’re going to love it. If watching a movie that makes you squirm and yelp and cover your eyes and repeatedly punch yourself in the leg sounds like it would be your kind of bag, then run, don’t walk, to the nearest theater that’s playing it. Similar to the electric, tactile kind of sound experience that Yelchin’s character tends to wax poetic about when he’s not being hunted by psychopaths, this is the sort of movie that you’re going to want to take in while surrounded by a fully plugged in crowd.
