Image: Green Room; Courtesy of Greenroom-movie.com
There’s a difference between shocking viewers and distressing them. While the former flows freely from sudden jump scares and splashes of gratuitous carnage, the latter doesn’t merely materialise from a single scene or a lone shot: it reflects a state of mind that percolates while watching. Gradually, a sense of trouble grows, heightened by the way the camera stays a beat too long in an early scene, or the grey sheen that subtly clouds the corresponding visuals, or the chilling calm demonstrated by an actor in a particular role. Discomfort lingers, emanating from every image and colouring each successive narrative development; persistent and insidious, it’s the kind of feeling that won’t dissipate in a hurry.
From the moment Green Room starts with the overhead view of a van nestled in the middle a cornfield — tellingly emphasising the vehicle’s off-kilter trajectory, as well as the swathe of mowed-down crops left in its wake, and foreshadowing an air of claustrophobia, too — that very sensation seethes throughout Jeremy Saulnier’s third feature. Fans of the writer/director’s previous effort, 2013’s Blue Ruin, will be in familiar territory. Once again, the filmmaker demonstrates a mastery of mood and an ability to convey unsettling sights with grace and precision that would threaten to overpower the economically told story in many other hands.
Groggily awakening to the sight of their farmland surroundings, punk-rock outfit The Ain’t Rights swiftly find that their off-road location isn’t their biggest problem. Initially, an empty fuel tank is, but after bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin, 5 to 7) and guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat, Nasty Baby) siphon enough gas to drive to a gig that promptly falls through, the quartet (with The Falling‘s Joe Cole and Victor Frankenstein‘s Callum Turner) thinks they might’ve reached the end of their tour. Eager to keep their hardcore show on the road, they begrudgingly agree to play at an Oregon roadhouse run by white supremacists. Cheekily covering the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” in their set doesn’t endear the group to the locals, nor does stumbling upon an altercation in the venue’s green room, or trying to avoid the murderous aftermath led by composed yet calculating club owner, Darcy (Patrick Stewart, X-Men: Days of Future Past), who’s intent on eradicating witnesses.
Luring a band of outsiders to a secluded place, disturbing the status quo with an unexpected event, and then stalking down innocent interlopers one by one over the course of a single night might come straight from the horror film playbook; however Green Room proves a meatier screen outing than the recognisable machinations of its kill-or-be-killed thriller template might suggest. Largely confined within and around the titular setting, Saulnier doesn’t flesh out his film with hidden depths — almost gleefully dissecting the rebellious attitude of the film’s protagonists by placing them in real life-or-death circumstances notwithstanding — but with a lean, mean and moody evocation of his chosen musical influence. Cue an audio-visual onslaught that knows how to make an impact in concentrated bursts, yet remains just as aware of and focused upon the importance of sustaining momentum. Tense encounters, smart dialogue, brutal instances of violence and even splashes of dark humour are layered throughout the slowly simmering feature, not to startle here and there but to ensure the disquieting atmosphere never ceases, or even seems as though it might.
Such an aim, to make the film ooze with agitation and anxiety in every frame, doesn’t just spring from the bleak but still naturalistic look imparted by cinematographer Sean Porter (Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter), or from the patient yet urgent pacing enforced by editor Julia Bloch (The Fly Room). Saulnier asks his cast to embody the same unrelenting unease, whether playing terrified but determined in Yelchin and Shawkat’s case, a scarily subdued aggressor such as Stewart, or, like co-star Imogen Poots (Knight of Cups), proving the inscrutable element perched between the two. Together, and alongside pivotal supporting turns by the likes of Macon Blair (another Blue Ruin alum) and Mark Webber (Happy Christmas) as neo-Nazi underlings, they provide the texture that the otherwise straightforward scenario could’ve too easily lacked. The beating heart of distress, after all, remains human, whether inflicting or experiencing it.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Director: Jeremy Saulnier
USA, 2015, 95 mins
Release date: 12 May
Distributor: Rialto
Rated: R
Actors:
Director:
Format:
Country:
Release:
