Though hardly comedic, 2013’s Blue Ruin managed to make a lot of noise for itself by being one of the darkest thrillers in recent memory that still managed to retain a sadistic sense of humour about itself. For his second effort, writer and director Jeremy Saulnier has moved up the rainbow with Green Room, a punk rock horror film that’s still chillingly comical, with a grisly side-order of neo-nazism as fronted by Patrick Stewart to boot.
The film starts out a touch Blues Brothers meets This Is Spinal Tap, following the band The Ain’t Rights as they make their way from show to show. While out on tour, the young punk outfit end up having to re-route a gig after a promoter leaves them a little short. The replacement show happens to be in a shed out in the middle of nowhere, populated by a particularly hard-right sect of punkers. The band take the show like any other and, despite opening with the anti-fascist anthem ‘Nazi Punks, Fuck Off’, their performance wins over the crowd. The goodwill is short-lived, though, as instead of sharing cheap beer and trading demos, the band end up in a tense stand-off with the venue’s owners after seeing something they shouldn’t have.
Unlike a lot of films that merge musical leanings with their tone and story, Green Room is very dedicated to being as genuinely punk as possible. Not just an excuse for a cool soundtrack, the entire film is permeated with punk principles with its minimalist approach, loud, quick action and gruesome consequences. Most of the picture is spent in the titular backstage area, feeding on the unwitting captives’ claustrophobia and isolation. The band, consisting of Daniel (Mark Webber), Sam (Alia Shawkat), Pat (Anton Yelchin), and Reece (Joe Cole) are locked in with security guard Big Justin (Eric Edelstein) and distraught attendee Amber (Imogen Poots). The entire second act is centred on just squeezing the air out of that situation with Patrick Stewart‘s Darcy Banker, the venue owner, working to slowly remove control from the group who keep themselves locked in the room for safe-keeping, a noisey background playlist an appropriately grizzled accompaniment. Stewart displays an often unseen dark side to himself in Banker, the cold, pragmatic and wholly terrifying nazi leader.
The four band members and their ally Amber give incredibly endearing performances under the circumstances, their comradery both heart-warmingly admirable and gut-wrenching as they fall prey to their skinhead hunters. As the influence of classic video nasties The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes gradually bleeds more into the film, slowly morphing it from a stand-off into a full blown slasher, seeing what happens next verges on nauseating. Saulnier pushes the narrative forward with sudden, quick, violent leaps, the pace working something like an old grind LP that has 37 songs in 22 minutes: the action comes in blasts and before you know it you’re trying to work out exactly what happened after someone’s arm has been nearly chopped off by a machete. Both as a director and as a writer, Saulnier pulls no punches with the brutality.
The nazi imagery isn’t just for show, either. With the horror nods, the squad of slightly unhinged, machete-happy neo-fascists fit right in as the central antagonists. They’re villains that don’t require explanation – racists are assholes to begin with, being locked in somewhere with a bunch of militant ones would be unnerving in and of itself. But by using just regular people as the crazy murderers of the piece, Saulnier makes a rather jarring comparison. For decades, these kinds of stories were told using mutants, backwater creeps and psychopaths as metaphors for living monsters. In Green Room, the hyperbolé is discarded and the truth laid bare – we are the mutants. Given that this film will forever share its general release with the year that Donald Trump got anywhere near taking the American presidency, it serves as a stark reminder that the backwoods creatures we may so fear are most frightening when we’re reminded they’re not creatures at all. They form the bed of a conservative, right-wing militancy riddled with bigoted ineptitude that’s proving itself in sheer volume that’s well-dressed, groomed and willing to hunt down any sympathisers to the contrary they need to to survive.
And somehow Saulnier finds a way to make this all work with a wry smile. It’s a blood-soaked one, no doubting that, but Green Room almost teeters on being uplifting in its defiance. It certainly isn’t for everyone – it’s the very antithesis of light entertainment – but it is the kind of movie that, if you can endure it and if the idea of an n-word spouting Patrick Stewart is darkly appealing to you, is at the very least likely to be among the most captivating watches of 2016. The right kind of noise.
