MOVIE REVIEW: Green Room

Corpse in Green Room provides just the start of savage violence

Tiger (Callum Turner), Sam (Alia Shawkat) and Pat (Anton Yelchin) are members of a hardcore punk band who find themselves in a precarious situation after playing a skinhead club in Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room.
Tiger (Callum Turner), Sam (Alia Shawkat) and Pat (Anton Yelchin) are members of a hardcore punk band who find themselves in a precarious situation after playing a skinhead club in Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room.

Rules are good things for young artists; they establish conventions that may be leaned into or subverted. It is in many respects easier to write a sturdy sonnet than successful free verse -- limitless options may invoke anxiety and paralysis. And so a genre film might be a useful enterprise for an aspiring young filmmaker, not only because there is a reliable audience for such products but because they impose certain imperatives: It becomes the filmmaker's job to ratchet tension and to startle, to deliver unto the audience thrills and shivers. It is not something you want to think too much about.

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Jacob Kasch (from left), Macon Blair and Patrick Stewart star in Green Room, a film about a punk rock band that has to fight for survival after they see a murder at a skinhead bar.

And I don't want to overthink Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room, which is witty and gory in an old-school way and feels a lot like the cheap horror movies that I remember playing in the drive-ins of my youth. It is not a morally sophisticated film, and it isn't as emotionally arresting or as thoughtful as Saulnier's previous feature, the rural revenge thriller Blue Ruin, which might be the best underseen movie of 2013.

Green Room

87 Cast: Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Patrick Stewart, Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole, Callum Turner, Macon Blair, David W. Thompson, Mark Webber, Eric Edelstein

Director: Jeremy Saulnier

Rating: R, for strong brutal graphic violence, gory images, language and some drug content

Running time: 95 minutes

But Blue Ruin slipped between the cracks of commercial viability. It was a little too rough and rural for the arthouse crowd and a little too philosophical and slow for the midnight-movie bunch, and if one wants to keep making movies one makes the necessary corrections. So we might expect Green Room to enjoy a long shelf life as a perennial scary movie, the kind of film that gets trotted out for special screenings and becomes a cherished essential in the home video libraries of certain devoted cultists. Like the films of Dario Argenta or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Green Room will persist in the imaginations of coming generations. It won't win Oscars, but that's hardly the point.

And as usual, I liked it better before the first machete blow fell, but that's just my problem. I enjoyed how Saulnier set up his main story of siege and escape by dropping us in situ into the day-to-day grind of an unsigned, marginally talented punk band -- singer Tiger (Callum Turner), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat), bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin) and drummer Reece (Joe Cole) -- playing out the string on what surely must be their final tour. Reduced to sleeping in their van and siphoning gas from parked cars to get from meager gig to meager gig, the Ain't Rights land hard when the Portland, Ore., date they were counting on falls through. Though the reedy mohawked promoter (David W. Thompson) has arranged a compensatory show -- they can play a local Mexican restaurant -- the $35 they earn won't buy them enough gas to make it back home to Arlington, Va. (not D.C., one of the band members points out, because such distinctions are everything in the world of punk rock).

Still feeling guilty, the promoter offers to get the band on the bill at a rural club managed by his cousin. It will pay them at least a few dollars. But they probably should avoid talking politics.

When the Ain't Rights arrive at the club, it quickly becomes apparent that the venue caters to neo-Nazi skinheads (and apparently to Nazis of a different kind; the Ain't Rights are rendered the "Aren't Rights" on the marquee). Still, the scene can accommodate all sorts -- the Ain't Rights begin their set with a famous Dead Kennedys' cover encouraging a reassessment of the tenets of National Socialism -- but despite that (or perhaps because of it) manage to win over the crowd. They get paid in cash and are about to be hustled away when one of them remembers a cellphone left in the green room. So they go back.

And see things they shouldn't see.

It's here where the film pivots from a tremendously interesting examination of the mostly repressed violence implicit in the punk rock music scene -- it's not surprising to learn that Saulnier once played in a band -- to a more conventional movie about kids trapped in a room surrounded by horror. The play is complicated by the presence of a corpse, the corpse's friend Amber (Imogen Poots) who knows how and why the corpse became a corpse, and Big Justin (Eric Edelstein), a genial, relatively reasonable member of the club staff who just happens to have a gun with insufficient bullets to keep him from being converted from threat to bargaining chip.

Before long, negotiations are underway, with a voice coming through the door. Darcy (Patrick Stewart) is obviously the capo di tutti capi around these parts, a charismatic old fuhrer who awards his best and most loyal thugs with red boot laces. He too sounds reasonable and trustable; he says he only wants to remove the (unregistered) gun from the equation before summoning the police. But of course it's not like that.

To say much more would spoil the particulars and much of the fun of Green Room. As in Blue Ruin, the folks with whom our empathy is aligned have moments of ineptness, and those whom we're supposed to enjoy seeing comeuppance-ed develop curious human qualities. You can almost feel sorry for Darcy having to clean up after the messiness of his minions. Other Nazi punks -- particularly Darcy's lieutenant Gabe (Macon Blair, who starred in Blue Ruin) and the promoter's cousin Daniel (Mark Webber) -- are drawn with nuance.

Shot by Sean Porter (Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter), the film has a grubby beauty correspondent with punk "authenticity," with some early scenes apparently shot with airborne drones lending a surreal quality.

If there's anything to criticize, it might be the sketchiness of the central mystery and the failure of the script to resolve some questions. Technically, Amber is a problematic character whose distaste for skinhead politics raises the question of what she was doing there in the first place, but Poots lends her character a kind of dreamy fecklessness that suggests a tendency to drift. She's there because the script needs her.

Tense, taut and brutal, Green Room features a fantastic ensemble -- there's not an off-key performance -- a plausibly horrific trap and what will pass for a cathartic resolution. And it all wraps up in 95 minutes. Saulnier will make better movies -- he has made a better movie -- but this one hits all the marks.'

MovieStyle on 04/29/2016

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