Green Room (2016, dir. Jeremy Saulnier)

There’s something dangerous about the woods. Yeah, the city is dangerous, but there’s something worse about the woods. You’re so far away from help. You’re isolated. The woods are cold and indifferent. So when the members of punk band The Ain’t Rights roll into the parking lot of neo-Nazi club plunked right down in the Oregonian forest there’s sinking feeling that hits your gut. I am ashamed to say I have not dedicated the time to watch Jeremy Saulnier’s previous picture Blue Ruin after hearing great things. Having seen Green Room, I must see this older film.

Green Room tells the story of a punk band that stumbles upon something they shouldn’t see in the back of a club. As mentioned before, neo-Nazis own the club and the band quickly become prisoners and involved in a brutal and violent standoff. Saying more would spoil the suspense of the film. The tension is built up beautifully through the moody ambient music of Brooke & Will Blair and the washed out cinematography of Sean Porter. Scenes are painted with pale green and blue ambiance and the tense drone that builds in the score. Right before all hell breaks lose all these elements come together and then explode into a nightmare.

The violence in Green Room reminded me a lot of Simon Rumley’s Red, White, & Blue. Harm to human beings is presented as realistically as possible, taking into account what actually happens to a body when hit with these sorts of traumas. There are many moments where you have to look away and the film doesn’t pull punches about who gets hurt and killed either. These are a group of young adults who aren’t trained to fight for their lives and they make the sorts of mistakes and show ineptitude with weapons that they truly would. I also loved the confidence of a couple characters going into extremely bad situations. That confidence is dealt with appropriately.

The acting is done very well with Patrick Stewart and the late Anton Yelchin heading up the cast. Stewart gives a great muted performance as the patriarch of this skinhead operation. He handles the band with just the right amount of calmness at the start, escalates as each side gets in their hits. Yelchin does a fine performance and is going for something very muted, unsure, and contemplative. You can’t watch his work now and not reflect on what we’ve lost. In the same way that seeing James Dean in Giant and East of Eden made me sad there weren’t films spanning decades featuring this actor, I feel the same way about Yelchin. I don’t believe we had truly seen his best work and films like Green Room show hints of that.

The supporting cast is excellent. Imogen Poots plays a local who ends up locked up with the band and brings a lot of physicality to the role that sold it. Her look and demeanor feel so real. The rest of the band does a great job, but it is the other neo-Nazis that are truly terrifying. Macon Blair plays Tad, the manager of the club and shows a lot of nuance. He’s not comfortable dealing with dead bodies and there’s a lot of unspoken and hinted at history that make him intriguing. Eric Edelstein plays an incredibly menacing skinhead that gets locked up in the room with the band. The stand out, though he is only on screen for a handful of minutes, would be Brent Werzner as Werm. He comes across a complete and total sociopath in his short screen time and is one of those people you pray to god you never meet in real life.

Green Room is a brutal story. But is is a very well told one. The narrative choices that are made help ratchet up the tension. Almost every moment of the film will leave you feeling the queasy, uneasiness, truly having no idea what horror is happening next. And this is definitely a horror film, not about the supernatural and not about a mindless slasher, but a horror story that preys on our fears of the big evil in the woods. This is what happens when you leave civilization and enter the realm of a vicious beast.