We first meet the struggling protagonists—singer Tiger (Callum Turner), bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat), and drummer Reece (Joe Cole)—in the beat-up old van they are using to tour the country, which often runs on gasoline they have siphoned from other cars. They are literally living hand to mouth, playing gigs wherever they can find them and crashing on available couches (when they’re not sleeping in the van). When a seemingly guaranteed deal falls apart, the guy who set it up offers them a back-up gig at the white supremacist club, which the band takes out of sheer desperation.

Being a punk band, they can’t help but push buttons, which is the only explanation for why they open their set with the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks F— Off,” which doesn’t play too well to the sneering, swastika-tattooed locals. Ugly looks from the crowd and a few flung beer bottles are the least of their problems, though, once they stumble upon the just murdered victim, who has been stabbed in the head by the house band’s hulking lead singer Werm (Brent Werzner). The band members are detained at the club by the manager, Gabe (Macon Blair), who promises they’re calling the cops when he’s really bringing in the club’s menacing owner, Darcy (Patrick Stewart), who quietly and ruthlessly begins plotting a cover-up that necessarily entails the murder of the witnesses.

One they realize what is happening, the witnesses, who in addition to the band members now includes the murdered girl’s friend, Amber (Imogen Poots), have no choice but to try to escape, which is tricky in an isolated cinderblock building with locked doors and almost no windows that is surrounded by a small army of murderous thugs wielding all manner of weapons, including trained pit bulls. For reasons involving the cover-up, Darcy doesn’t want them to be shot, which adds an extra level of brutality to the film as the majority of the violence is inflicted with box cutters and machetes and baseball bats and pipes and pit bull teeth. The band members try various avenues of escape, all of which are met with bloodshed, and part of the film’s goosy, unsettling thrill is trying to figure out who among them will prove to be ruthless enough to make it out alive—if any. In Green Room, survival isn’t necessarily for the fittest, but rather for the most merciless.

Saulnier, whose previous film was the revenge thriller Blue Ruin (2013), has a gift (for lack of a better word) for violence; he knows exactly how much to show to set you on edge, but without turning the film into a grisly freak show. The make-up effects are all practical and realistic, and he shies away from the digital blood spray that too many directors fall back on for lazy effect. He and cinematographer Sean Porter intensify the violence with a grimy, isolated atmosphere that is lit like a festering bruise; it is as if the rest of the world has ceased to exist outside this one club in the woods, which makes the film feel like a sick-twisted fairy tale of sorts.

Saulnier gets good performances out of his cast, with Yelchin (who sadly died in a freak accident a few months after the film’s release) and Poots in particular bearing the brunt of the film’s portrait of what it takes to survive, while Macon Blair (who was the main star of Blue Ruin) adds a nice bit of complexity to the film’s otherwise single-minded and one-dimensional villains. The casting of Shakespeare veteran and erstwhile Star Trek commander Patrick Stewart as a skinhead leader certainly makes for great copy, and he has a few moments of quiet, seething menace that really work, but as a whole he has minimal impact, perhaps because he clearly chose to underplay the role, rather than chomping away at the increasingly blood-spattered scenery.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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