TIFF 2015 Review | ‘Green Room’ Has Strong Fear On Tap

Redneck Oregon is the hard-livin’, easy-stabbin’ setting of The Green Room, writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s follow-up to the cult thriller Blue Ruin. Somewhere between a modern-day Sparta and a white-supremacist cult kept insular by its neo-Nazi club owner Darcy (Patrick Stewart), mid-ranking members prove themselves worthy of wearing blood-red laces on their heavy black boots through bureaucratic violence, while kids who may or may not be past their teenage years offer their pale bellies to be shivved for a few hundred bucks. It’s no big deal; they’ve been stabbed before. 

A shrugging indifference toward the morality of carnage and a fetishistic but practical embrace of the same give The Green Room its leather-and-silver menace. That naturalistic Confederate Gothic atmosphere is the most distinctive element of the film, an effective if largely predictable nightmare (in a vindication-of-the-formula sort of way) about a burnout punk band trapped in — you guessed it — the green room (i.e., dressing room) of Darcy’s club. 

After a taco-shack show in which they each net six dollars, the four members of Cowcatcher (Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat, Mark Webber and Callum Turner) ignore their better judgment and agree to play for some proud Aryans. They don’t earn any fans by improvising “Nazis, fuck off!” on stage, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway — they’ve already seen too much. When they return to the green room, there’s a girl lying on the floor with a scabbard sticking out of her skull; the rest of the knife’s deep in her brain. Darcy and his sad-eyed, approval-seeking protégé Gabe (Macon Blair, who starred in Blue Ruin) need to make sure the band won’t call the cops — and the surest way of making that happen is killing them off. While the aptly named Big Justin (Eric Edelstein) guards the door to the green room from the inside, the band and the dead girl’s platinum-blond-mulletted friend Amber (Imogen Poots) — the only one who knows her way around the club — plot their escape. 

There’s a convoluted reason why Darcy refrains from just shooting everyone that’s explained in the measured first act — or maybe not, it’s occasionally difficult to understand the muffled dialogue — so in come attack dogs and machete-wielding henchmen. There’s little more to the plot than the band’s quickly diminishing membership; the more they attempt to explore the club, searching for weapons or protection, the more reasons they stumble into why Darcy won’t let them leave in a well-paced series of reveals. Most of the gore is hidden in darkness, and the maimings the band slowly suffer, which include a nearly amputated hand, occupy a restrained space between realism and rubberiness. 

More convincing than the flesh wounds is the film’s masterful rhythm between teasing suspense and controlled mayhem. A small paternal development between Darcy and Gabe is accomplished entirely through Stewart’s stately gravitas, though it’s unfortunate the knighted actor doesn’t have more to do. But best are the small character details that make the band believable. They don’t manage to come through as distinct individuals, but it’s easy to discern a sense of camaraderie among a droll quartet who’ve nursed a lot of hangovers together — and so it matters when band members’ vocal cords become pit-bull chow. Kudos to Saulnier on his third thriller; he’s somehow made neo-Nazis even scarier. 

Images via A24

The Best of TIFF 2015 | Exclusive Reviews, Interviews and Videos