Green Room punks the usual action-horror beats in favor of gnawing tension
With his crowd-funded 2014 indie sleeper, Blue Ruin, writer-director Jeremy Saulnier crafted a revenge story that didn’t romanticize vengeance, highlighted by several messy showdowns between believable characters — real-seeming people, not standard-issue movie killers.
In his new thriller, Green Room, Saulnier expounds on the energy of those showdowns and offers up a detailed, feature-length study in how to sustain tension. There’s less character development here than in Blue Ruin, but the director’s talent remains on ready display: Where traditional action-movie beats would go, he takes his time surveying the situation and teasing all possible outcomes before committing his story to one of them.
The Ain’t Rights are a desperate, sleep-deprived punk band from Arlington, Virginia. They are a long way from home, tooling around the Pacific Northwest in a van powered by illegally siphoned gas, their tour having come to a lackluster end with a podcast interview and a lame gig in a Mexican restaurant. (One of Green Room‘s pleasures is its deep knowledge of an underground band’s touring life, hitting the attitudes and settings dead-on.) But they can’t resist the opportunity to make $300 and play one more show — even if it is at a neo-Nazi skinhead stronghold, deep in the woods outside Portland. Aiming to sound rebellious, Pat (Anton Yelchin), Sam (Alia Shawkat) and the rest of the band open their private gig with the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks F**k Off.”
Menace is everywhere, but Green Room doesn’t tackle issues of white supremacy or right-wing extremism in any serious fashion. It merely uses this secluded club and its lifestyle as a backdrop for nonstop, stomach-twisting tension — which kicks into gear when the band stumbles upon a dead body in the green room and is not allowed to leave.
As in Blue Ruin, no one here is particularly skilled at killing. There are enough guns in the bunker for a long standoff, but the skinheads here aren’t exactly in Ammon Bundy’s league. Led by the quiet but commanding Darcy (Patrick Stewart), they may think themselves part of a “movement” — as Darcy calls it — but the club is really just a front for a very typical criminal operation. Not that Saulnier has given us one-dimensional bad guys. Each of these henchmen (a group anchored by Blue Ruin’s Macon Blair) has moments within the mounting action to let his own personality and motivations come forward.
If there’s a thematic thread to be found, it’s that no one is really who he or she seems to be. (A running joke of the Ain’t Rights naming their desert-island artists has several un-punk payoffs.) Furthermore, no one reacts under pressure according to any code. People on both sides of this ugly situation behave in ways that are not always practical but generally are surprising, emotional and believable. The setup is straight out of an exploitation film, but the thrills aren’t cheap, and there are no plot twists for twists’ sake. The action is potent and shocking.
Saulnier is now two strong films into actually telling us something about the messy violence he depicts: that bad choices lead to more bad choices. It’s a sad truth for the characters, but a memorable experience for those of us watching.
