Overview
A young punk rock band find themselves trapped in a secluded venue after stumbling upon a horrific act of violence.
Green Room has only had a limited cinema release, mainly doing the rounds on film festivals around the world. It’s not a big budget, big thrills movie. Like director Jeremy Saulnier’s previous movie, Blue Ruin, it is a small movie rooted in what feels like a classic B-movie set-up and script, but one that again delivers surprisingly well.
A punk-rock band, The Ain’t Rights, aren’t particularly successful, and if they can even get a gig, they still don’t get much of an audience it seems… So when they get a last minute booking somewhere in the Oregon woods to play for a bunch of skinheads, they accept it as it may bring in some cash at least.
When they get there, they realise this place isn’t just a few skinheads hanging out – it feels more like the local white supremacy headquarters. They play a poorly chosen number for an antagonistic crowd and quickly make their way to the green room, where they accidentally walk in to a murder scene, and soon find themselves on the wrong side of a cover-up: now they also need to be taken care of…
The story is straightforward, so it is all in the experience. And Saulnier delivers a well-constructed and tautly directed experience: dark, claustrophobic, not scaring away from violence but without making it a horror gore fest, and a nice touch by making Patrick Stewart the white-supremacist-in-charge. We know this cannot end well, but we don’t know who is going to the bite the dust next…
Simple but effective.
★★★½
