A band living gig to gig, while still trying to keep it metal get a great opportunity at an extremist bar, however something goes wrong and the band find themselves held prisoner. ‘Green Room’ is Jeremy Saulnier’s follow up to the great ‘Blue Ruin’ and hopefully his next film will be ‘Purple Riot’.
Saulnier excels in creating ultra gritty, grimy and gorey stories filled with raw emotion, fear and malice, and ‘Green Room’ turns all of that up to max while keeping it surprisingly artful and successfully walking the line of taste.
The entire cast are very good, with the two notable exceptions being Patrick Stewart, playing against type as the leader of the neo-nazi ne’er do wells, who is pretty bad, his accent is all over the world and his theatrical history, while impressive, was just too hammy for the role. The other exception being Macon Blair, who played the lead in ‘Blue Ruin’, instead here he takes a smaller role, albeit with similar range, and he is great.
Obviously it would be hard to talk about the cast without mentioning the elephant in the room, this was unfortunately one of Anton Yelchin’s final roles before his tragic death in June 2016, he truly was a talented actor, though he has had better roles that showcased his talent and range.
The story was very interesting and the pacing were lightning fast, but you didn’t lose anything to the pacing as the characters, their story, and their emotions were all laid out for you in order for you to empathise with them.
It takes a little while for it to dip into horror film territory, but once it dipped, it plunged at a breakneck speed and at times it was very tense and scary but the film managed to maintain a nice sense of humour about itself. The abundance of gore was shocking but used precisely and at fairly opportune moments, make it have such an effect on the viewer that it allowed them to become more tense and allows them to edge ever so closely to the edge of their seats.
While the big showdown wasn’t nearly as tense as ‘Blue Ruin’, this film still brought its own unique edge to the table and for what it was going for, it was executed perfectly, and more importantly, it allowed relief and a satisfying conclusion.
7/10
