Green Room is an
abysmal new horror-thriller from writer-director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin) about a punk-metal band
trapped inside a dive-bar by a bunch of white supremacists. The movie recalls,
loosely, the exploitation shockers from the 70s like Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, but Green Room never builds to the fever
pitch of Last House or other similar
films that, as reprehensible as most of them are, at least had the courage to embrace
total insanity. Green Room certainly embraces
its own gruesome and unpleasant nature, but this movie never loses control,
never just goes full-on crazy. If it did, perhaps it would be better. Green Room is too calculated for that,
like a sociopath who just wants you to think
he’s bonkers. And the movie never develops the kind of loose energy that great
exploitation movies need: it’s all fits and starts (the attackers attack, the
victims fight back, things settle down, they heat up again, and so on).
Furthermore, Saulnier weighs the movie down with too much inane dialogue between his
characters. Saulnier rightly wants to give his audience little breaks from the
tension, but his dopey characters utter their lines with such bland disinterest
that they might as well be filming their Behind-the-Music documentary when
they’re not fending off machetes and attack dogs.
Here’s the setup: At a dive-bar somewhere in Southern
Oregon, Patrick (Anton Yelchin), a guitarist in a punk-metal band witnesses a
murder and tries to call 911 before one of the killers wrests the phone from him
and he and his band-mates are locked inside the green room. Inside with Patrick
are Reece (Joe Cole), Sam (Alia Shawkat), and Tiger (Callum Turner), along with
one of the white supremacist’s girlfriends, Amber (Imogen Poots), and keeping
watch is one of the Neo-Nazis, a big bear of a man named Justin, who pretty
successfully takes on three of the skinny 20-somethings with ease, until one of
them gets him in a death grip and holds him there until the others can snatch
his gun.
But it doesn’t matter: these white supremacists are
well-organized. They stage a fake stabbing in order to lose the police, and
then summon Darcy, their icy, calculating neo-Nazi leader (Patrick Stewart), to
figure out what to do with the band-mates. Instead of quickly dispatching with
their prisoners, Darcy and his men wage a relentless, strategic, escalating
attack against four skinny middle-class 20-something who may be the least
resourceful smart kids I’ve ever seen in a horror movie. Perhaps this is a
cautionary tale about how millenials will fare in a crisis: They argue about
who has to hold the gun, they make too much noise when they try to escape, and Patrick
has to trick himself that it’s all a game in order to fight back. (This is
after he nearly loses his hand in a particularly grueling scene.)
But, in their defense, the band-mates do have a few tricks
up their sleeves: They use microphones and speakers to create feedback in the
monitors, which makes the attack dogs whimper and retreat. Sam makes effective
use of a fire extinguisher; other
band members use any makeshift weapon they can find, from a mic stand to one of
those long, glow-stick-like fluorescent light bulbs.
Patrick emerges as the film’s unlikely hero, although he’s
aided by the surprisingly funny and strong-willed Neo-Nazi girl Amber. At the
beginning of the movie, we hear Patrick waxing on about the beauty of live performance
as the only true way to experience music. But in the green room, none of his
eloquent theories about art matter. He’s reduced to his own instincts and
physical strength, and initially he cowers. But Patrick is the one who finally
psyches himself up enough to fight back, by imagining it’s all just a game,
that he doesn’t have to worry about death. He can never fully embrace the
reality of the situation. “This is a nightmare,” he says. “Shouldn’t we be
panicking?” Except for his reaction to the aforementioned injury, Patrick’s emotions do not fluctuate; he’s never truly affected
by anything, not even the deaths of people he cares about.
Those little quips like “shouldn’t we be panicking?” are
uttered in mockery of the situation, and they amount to decidedly lackluster
attempts at levity. Green Room may be
too self-serious to start making light of things in the first place. Saulnier
wants to horrify us with his images, like when he cuts to a close-up of a
character’s mangled neck: he’s just been ferociously mauled by a hell-hound, Baskerville style. Saulnier establishes
a lame running joke too: Early in the film, when the band-mates are being
interviewed for some underground radio show, the host asks each of them what
band they’d want to listen to if stranded on a desert island. As perhaps
another cynical jab at 20-somethings, Saulnier lets the band-mates agonize over
their choices, as though the scenario might one day present itself for real,
and they’d be really sorry if they accidentally picked the Ramones over the Sex
Pistols (but secretly really wanted Madonna).
Near the end of the movie, Patrick, who has been unable to
think of an answer, says, “I figured out my desert island band.” Amber, the
white supremacist chick who’s been thrust into their world as a fellow
prisoner, retorts, “find somebody who gives a shit.” The joke works
beautifully, thanks to Amber’s droll delivery. (Poots is really the stand-out
in this movie.) Anton Yelchin, who brandishes his husky voice like a velvety
cutlass, is a strong performer, and he’s able to carry Green Room in spite of its many short-comings. (And of course,
Patrick Stewart is perfectly cast as the Neo-Nazi Father, running the show,
keeping dangerously calm throughout.)
But no one saves Green
Room from being irritating and unpleasant. Gore hounds may enjoy this
movie, although it’s not really that gory. It has a few hard-to-watch scenes.
More than anything, Green Room is
about survival, about being stripped of the BS that we normally carry around as
armor, when we realize none of it will keep us safe in the face of a truly
surreal crisis. But this idea wasn’t enough to make me care about the movie. I
felt a lot like Amber did.
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