Review: Green Room

Dir. Jeremy Saulnier (2015)

The following review contains minor spoilers.

A down-on-their-luck punk band find themselves trapped in a neo-nazi bar after a last minute gig goes horribly wrong. The movie takes its time initially, establishing a real sense of place and atmosphere. We never really get to know our cast of characters all too well, but character complexity is traded for situational complexity. There is more going on under the hood of this film than initially meets the eye and we unearth its insidious machinations alongside our earnest, yet occasionally dimwitted heroes. About halfway through the runtime, things take a turn for the worse. Green Room isn’t kidding around. The tension is unrelenting and the violence is extreme yet realistic in its depiction...which only makes it harder to witness.

I consider myself a fan of the horror genre and I wouldn’t really consider Green Room to be a horror movie...yet I certainly had difficulty watching some moments. Overall, the movie is brutally nihilistic in execution. It hammers the audience with waves of sickly anxiety, dead serious, brutal, and single-minded in its aims. But then, at the last second, it hits the audience with an unexpected laugh out loud joke and cuts to the credits. It’s certainly a ride that’s not for everyone. Some movies lose impact and relevance with age, Green Room is NOT one of those movies. The longer it’s around, the more layers it gains.

Several months after Green Room’s release in the states, the star of the film, Aton Yelchin was tragically killed in a freak accident. Couple this sad circumstance with the reality that we exist in a time when neo-nazi’s openly march in the streets and the president of the united states has white supremacist ties and, well, Green Room packs quite the incidental punch in addition to it’s intentional ones. A character’s ignorance early in the film about the political leanings of white-supremacists has dire consequences. He’s not sure what they are, he thinks they’re either far right or far left but he doesn’t know and doesn’t care. His perspective matches that of many people today, the film through this lens acting as a vinegar rebuke to willful political ignorance. Current revelations about sexual abuse or poor treatment of workers in the entertainment industry adds further relevance to Green Room’s central point of conflict. When spending money on music, movies, or products in general; we aren’t thinking of the views of those BEHIND the music, movies, or products. But if we ended up being the ones victimized by said people, our consumption habits would change in a heartbeat.

The punk band doesn’t share the views of the skinheads at the dive they’re playing, they take a big gamble by making a huge point of it. But they do intend to profit from them, this choice has consequences. There are characters who are trying to get out of the white supremacist group altogether and one who wants to stay in the community because she likes the music but, in her own words, isn’t a neo-nazi. Green Room is cut and dry with it’s messaging. Once you’re implicit in evil, no matter how far removed from it you think you are, it’s going to catch up with you in the end. It’s terrifying, it’s disgusting, it’s riveting, and (for the right audience) it’s utterly worth watching.

So, should you see Green Room? If a nail-biting thriller with realistic gore, razor barbed social commentary, and a haunting Patrick Stewart; all marinated in a grimy punk rock/hardcore music needle-bath sounds like a roller coaster tailor-made for your particular brand of weird. Then yes, sit on down next to me and please keep arms and legs inside the ride vehicle at all times.

-Josh Evans