A decade ago, A24 released Green Room. Somewhere along the way, my review for The Stranger got truncated, so here's the full version. Slightly revised from the original text.
GREEN ROOM
(Jeremy Saulnier, USA, 2015, 95 minutes)
There's a moment in many horror movies when the director breaks from the main story to show how the monster got so monstrous. Then they return to the action, but the stakes are raised, because the bad guy isn't as faceless as before. Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin) has no time for that jive. Bad guys are bad guys. The goal is to escape their clutches by any means possible.
And so it goes for the punk band, the Ain't Rights, that ends up playing a gig at a white supremacist compound in Oregon--shades of Malheur--out of sheer desperation. The group, which includes Anton Yelchin (Star Trek's Chekov) and Alia Shawkat (Kelly Reichardt's Oregon-set Night Moves), raises a convincing racket, but they don't help their cause when they open their set with Dead Kennedys' evergreen 1981 anthem "Nazi Punks Fuck Off."
Then they witness a murder and the neo-Nazis (led by a chilly Patrick Stewart, the cast's other Star Trek veteran) give them the "Hotel California" treatment, i.e. "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave." From that point forward, it's punks versus skinheads set to a propulsive soundtrack of Bad Brains, Slayer, and Poison Idea.
In contrast with Tony Kaye's American History X and Shane Meadows' This Is England, Saulnier's skins play more like cold-hearted businessmen than pathetic fucks. The fun is in witnessing the ingenious ways the punks--including two turncoats--fight back using the crudest tools available.
It's fast, bloody, and when you least expect it: hilarious.
Postscript: A24 released Green Room on April 15, 2016. A little over a month later, Anton Yelchin was dead at 27 due to a vehicle malfunction (his family settled with the manufacturer out of court). A documentary about his life, Love Antosha, appeared in 2019, but I'm still not ready to watch it.
Left: Jeremy Saulnier with Aaron Pierre
On a happier note, Saulnier followed Green Room with the Netflix movies Hold the Dark and Rebel Ridge, which won the 2024 Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie. It was one of the year's best and introduced the world to Aaron Pierre, who first came to my attention in Barry Jenkins' adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad. Pierre can now be seen on HBO's Lanterns opposite Kyle Chandler.
Also, I had no idea who Callum Turner was in 2016, and didn't mention him in my review (I didn't mention Imogen Poots or Macon Blair either). This year, Turner appeared in several features, including the inimitable Mark Jenkin's Rose of Nevada. He's also reportedly in the running as the next James Bond. And, oh yeah, he married pop superstar Dua Lipa in May.
Green Room plays Northwest Film Forum for one night only on Wed, Oct 14, as part of Seattle Film Critics Society's SFCS at 10 series. After the screening, Matt Oakes (Silver Screen Riot) will be conducting a live virtual interview with Jeremy Saulnier. We're working on other surprises, as well.
Click here for tickets and more information. We'll be following with David Eggers' The VVitch on Nov 19 and Barry Jenkins' Moonlight on Dec 9.
Images from A24 by way of Vox (Callum Turner, Alia Shawkat, and Anton Yelchin) and The Guardian (Patrick Stewart with Brent Werzner, Mason Knight, Samuel Summer, and Colton Ruscheinsky) and The Associated Press (Jeremy Saulnier with Aaron Pierre / credit: AP Photo / Chris Pizzello).
In its abstraction, E. Elias Merhige's directorial debut, Begotten, plays like a Gothic goulash of silent film fragments that have been moldering and degrading for decades.
The combination of rephotographed 16mm B&W reversal film, neutral-density filtration, musique concrète, and eerie sound effects conjures up a powerful sense of unease, enhanced by the lack of dialogue or intertitles.
The story involves three characters: God, Mother Earth, and the Son of Earth, all played by members of Merhige's stage company Theatreofmaterial. Through an open door, he begins with a masked, white-garbed God (Brian Salzburg) on a chair in a corner, spattered with deep black blood as he slices away at his midsection with a straight razor. As he slashes, God convulses while what sounds like a clock submerged in water ticks away on the soundtrack (other sounds arranged and composed by Evan Albam include thunder, buzzing flies and crickets, heartbeats, and persistent moans).
Gradually, entrails fall to the floor. Even after God takes a final breath and slumps to the side, the blood continues to flow until Mother Earth (Donna Dempsey), wearing a diaphanous dress with a mask covering her eyes, emerges from underneath the voluminous fabric and glides out of the room.
After spinning around, head tilted toward the sky, she returns to God where she proceeds to impregnate herself. It isn't necrophilia in the usual sense, but she takes what she needs to conceive. Most every image in the film is too nebulous to cause offense.
Merhige then shifts to a rocky hillside on which her naked, fully-grown, mud-encrusted son (Stephen Charles Barry), aka Flesh on Bone, writhes while nomads in threadbare robes watch impassively before carting him away on a makeshift stretcher to inflict more pain before dragging him to the top of the hill. Merhige probably wouldn't appreciate a comparison to The Passion of the Christ, but it definitely crossed my mind, since Mel Gibson's blood-drenched drama practically exults in Jesus's protracted, excruciating ordeal.
After the son is left to die, the mother returns to drag him away by an umbilical cord-like lead, but she doesn't get far before pants-free nomads arrive to torture her. As they drag away her lifeless body, the son can only watch helplessly. Then again, if she had dragged him much further, she might have strangled him. There's beauty in this film, but there's no love or tenderness. It simply doesn't exist in the pitiless world Merhige has created.
By the end, the bodies have been returned to the Earth. Considering that I watched this film back-to-back with The Life We Leave, it occurred to me that Merhige was ahead of the curve when it comes to terramation. He even ends with buds emerging from the soil as the nomads go about their business without a thought for the mulched-up victims of their violence.
Begotten is a singular experience, though it reminds me of things I would rather not think about, like Marilyn Manson. Merhige, a one-time collaborator, helped to shape Manson's image through videos and tour production. Then again, Trent Reznor was drawing from similar influences, like death-obsessed photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, and look at the two guys now: Reznor has gone from strength to strength, particularly in his film-scoring partnership with Atticus Ross, while Manson is now better known for the horrific abuse he inflicted on several women, including actress Evan Rachel Wood.
Merhige, I'm sure, couldn't have known what was to come, and the two last worked together 30 years ago, but I did my due diligence and watched the videos for "Antichrist Superstar" and "Cryptorchid." In the first, Manson plays a dirtbag fascist ranting from a stage in front of an adoring crowd. There's no trace of Merhige's personality, but the latter is a different story, since it plays like Begotten in miniature, not least because it includes footage from the feature. Even the crackling sound design is similar.
The director followed up with two studio pictures, 2000's Oscar-nominated horror satire Shadow of the Vampire and 2004's psychological thriller Suspect Zero, before making two short Begotten sequels, 2006's "Din of Celestial Birds" and 2022's "Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera," and a final video for Interpol's "The Heinrich Maneuver." Since then, he's worked mostly in theater, though he supervised the 4K restoration of his first feature and has been working on a Leonardo DiCaprio-produced survival drama.
Though I hadn't yet seen Begotten in 2000, Merhige's reputation preceded him, and I made certain to catch his followup when I attended the Toronto International Film Festival that year, especially because he was in attendance with Willem Dafoe, who plays actor Max Schreck, John Malkovich, who plays Nosferatu director F.W. Murnau, and Catherine McCormack, who plays actress Greta Schröder. I found the film, which has all the humor Begotten lacks, pretty delightful.
Merhige's first and last film for Lionsgate presents a highly fictionalized behind-the-scenes look at the making of Murnau's 1922 masterpiece with Malkovich as a win-at-all-costs director and Dafoe in go-for-broke mode as a real-life, bloodsucking Count Orlock. No doubt Merhige had great fun recreating B&W sequences from the original film. If Begotten wasn't to my taste, Vampire definitely was, and I wish he had made more films like it.
To his credit, though, Begotten has garnered plenty of admirers. Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, who found the whole thing fairly ridiculous, was not one of them, but the great cultural critic Susan Sontag was fully on board. At the very least, it's part of an experimental, late-20th-century lineage that includes such notable works as Bill Morrison's Decasia, Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God, and Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle.
Love or loathe it, Begotten is the kind of film every cinephile should see at least once. And for the Goth or Goth-adjacent: it should be required viewing.
Begotten opens at New York's Film Forum on Oct 2; sneak preview on Oct 1 with the director in attendance. It opens in Seattle at Northwest Film Forum on Oct 23. Begotten images (featuring Donna Dempsey and Stephen Charles Barry) from Kino Lorber and Shadow of the Vampire image (Willem Dafoe and Catherine McCormack) from Lionsgate by way of Anti-Film School.
The Sun Never Sets isn't really about Alaska, but Joe Swanberg set his latest feature, his first in six years, in my home state.
I'm not sure why, because it isn't the easiest place to shoot a feature, independent or otherwise. The summer days are so long, the winter days are so short--and cold and icy--and everything is more expensive.
A film's budget will only balloon the more a director flies in actors, crew members, and equipment. I'm sure he used as many local resources as possible, but those are limited, so I would imagine it was still a challenge. Then again, maybe that's just what he needed to shake up his routine.
For these and other reasons, most films and TV shows set in Alaska, like Northern Exposure or Christopher Nolan's Insomnia, are filmed elsewhere, usually Canada or Washington, and I can always tell, since I grew up there.
Right: David Strathairn as a sweaty guy who probably smells like salmon in John Sayles' Limbo
Maybe most people can't tell, but it's always bothered me, so John Sayles' Limbo, a low-key 1999 thriller, and Sean Penn's 2007 Jon Krakauer adaptation Into the Wild felt like outliers. Granted, I wasn't completely surprised that Sayles and Penn would film on location, but Swanberg, the one-time Chicago King of Mumblecore? No, I did not see that coming.
I've long had a fraught relationship with the director’s work. Granted, I haven't seen all 20 features, plus streaming projects, but I've seen enough. Drinking Buddies (2013), however, marked a shift from the solipsistic, navel-gazey films that had come before.
In it, Olivia Wilde and Swanberg muse Jake Johnson play straight people who forge a Platonic friendship, and that's the gist of it. It isn't as common as you might think, since most on-screen friendships comprise women with women and men with men, not counting the gay best friend, since there's no possibility of romance–unless one of the straight people realizes they aren't so straight after all.
The Sun Never Sets is a return to the loose-limbed relationship dramas with which Swanberg made his name, albeit on a slightly bigger scale and with a more experienced director at the helm.
Dakota Fanning, most recently of Netflix's Ripley, plays Wendy, a 31-year-old heavy-machine operator whose married friends are starting to have kids. She can't relate, because it isn't where she's at, at least not yet. (Swanberg had two kids with filmmaker Kris Rey, from whom he is now divorced.)
Left: a more glammed-up Dakota Fanning in Ripley with Johnny Flynn
Wendy isn't single, though. For the past two years, she's been seeing Jack (Johnson, recently of Apple TV's Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed), a middle-aged hedge fund manager and part-time girls basketball coach with two kids of his own. His ex-wife (Anna Konkle) has moved on to a new partner (played by Swanberg) and new kid, but the director avoids soap operatics, since Jack doesn't resent his ex and the kids don't resent his girlfriend.
Wendy believes she's ready to settle down with a guy who doesn't want to remarry or have more kids, but Jack is skeptical, since she has interests, like camping and houseboats, that don't jibe with his. He's not wrong that she isn't ready, but his demand that they separate for six months, so that she can explore life as an unencumbered individual--a sort of Rumspringa for non-Amish adults--feels controlling, since he doesn't give her a choice, though he swears he'll be waiting for her if she decides to return.
If I were in her shoes, I wouldn't, because one-sided ultimatums don't bode well for lasting relationships, not least when her friends take his side. She also has the option of not seeing anyone and biding her time for six months, but she reenters the dating pool instead, both awkwardly and reluctantly.
Then one night, she runs into Chuck (Gotham's Cory Michael Smith), an old flame who has returned to town as a pilot for an air taxi company, and their chemistry is instant, even after three years apart (though Fanning and Johnson have an amiable rapport, there's more sexual heat between her and Smith). Jack didn't think she would hook up with another guy so soon, but she does, and he doesn't take it well. I can see why she might want to have fun while they're on a break, but Chuck immediately starts talking marriage, and she doesn't seem to find that premature.
Fanning is very good, and this is mostly her film, as much as Apple TV's Margo's Got Money Troubles was mostly sister Elle's show, but Swanberg treats her like a yo-yo. That's the point, but as the men increase the pressure, and she bounces between the two, both look like bad bets.
Alaska may offer its share of "sweaty guys who smell like salmon," but that's no reason to settle. The way Jack tells her he loves her over and over again comes to feel aggressive, especially since she rarely says she loves him back. I don't doubt that she does, but not quite as passionately.
Tired of being alone, Jack takes up with Sara (Karley Sciortino from Swanberg's Netflix series Easy and co-writer of Gregg Araki's I Want Your Sex), and the two couples even run into each other at her favorite watering hole for trivia night, but Swanberg doesn't play any of this for laughs, despite the way some viewers--though not me--have characterized the film as a rom-com.
That tense evening, which leads to a series of shouting and laughing matches, serves as a catalyst, but not necessarily in the way I would have expected. I was certain the film would end in one very particular way, but it doesn't, and that's to Swanberg's credit, since these characters all have some work to do.
Though reviews have been all over the map, I liked the film more than not, and would recommend Richard Brody's unusual review, in which he explains how what might play like weaknesses in another film become strengths in this one. The Sun Never Sets can be repetitive, some actors handle the improvised dialogue better than others, and there's more mid-tempo singer-songwriter material on the soundtrack than any one film can use, some performed by Joe's brother James. None of it is bad, necessarily, and I'm always happy to hear former Seattleities La Luz, but it lends the film an adult contemporary sheen that works against the prickliness of the scenario.
I could also nitpick Swanberg's representation of Anchorage, nicely shot in 35mm by Eon Mora, except he's not far off the mark. Not everyone works as a pilot or a fisherman; there are lawyers and accountants, too, but that's never been Swanberg's milieu, so it makes sense that he would focus on less-corporate types, some of whom also paint or, like Wendy, work with wood. And it was fun to spot familiar locations, like Chilkoot Charlie's, Kaladi Brothers Coffee, and the Sunshine Plaza (above), where my mom worked as a pre-sentence reporter for the Alaska State Department of Corrections.
I wouldn't want to overpraise The Sun Never Sets, but it deserves better than it's gotten, and may well serve as the most accurate cinematic depiction of my hometown to date.
I mean, the sky really is pearlescent white, not blue or grey, more often than not. It's the damnest thing, and probably has a lot to do with Cook Inlet, the body of water bordering the city, but when you see a film set in and around Anchorage featuring the bluest of blue skies, you can bet it was probably shot somewhere else.
The Sun Never Sets only played in Seattle on Sept 10, but it's playing IFC Center in New York through Sept 17. It's also playing Anchorage's Cinemark Century and Beartooth Theatre Pub, among other venues. Images: The Independent Film Company via Mark Reviews Movies (Dakota Fanning), Far Out Magazine (Fanning and Cory Michael Smith), 1A (Fanning and Jake Johnson), and the IMDb (David Strathairn and Fanning and Flynn).
Here is a revived version of a 2006 Seattle Sound piece about Lynn Shelton's directorial debut and a sidebar about the independent company that produced it. I'm not certain when the publication came to an end, but I contributed from 2006-2007, during which time it morphed into Sound. City Arts, also now expired, would rise from the ashes.
LYNN SHELTON AND LAURA VEIRS:
CONVERSATIONS WITH MY 13-YEAR-OLD SELF
For her first full-length feature, Lynn Shelton, who traded acting for directing several years ago, decided to revisit a time in her life that may be long gone, but still feels as fresh as last night's dream.
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at 2006's Slamdance Film Festival, We Go Way Back is the captivating result.
Dreams, in fact, play a big part in the story, as Kate (Cornish grad Amber Hubert), a fixture on the fringe circuit, finds her dream-life intruding upon her real life upon turning 23.
Offered the lead in Ibsen's proto-feminist drama Hedda Gabler, the Ballard actress should be thrilled, but instead she keeps re-reading letters she wrote to herself at 13. Meanwhile, the play's production grows increasingly convoluted, to the point where Kate must speak her lines in Norwegian, while everyone else gets to speak in English. Then there are all the not-great men she can't resist. Why? What happened to her self-confidence?
Kate dreams about the more self-assured young woman she used to be until that person--13-year-old Kate (Garfield student Maggie Brown)--comes to life. As Shelton explains in her director's statement, "At 13, I possessed a clarity of vision and a degree of self-confidence that I marvel at today."
Aside from the Northwest talent on both sides of the camera, We Go Way Back takes place in Seattle and the Key Peninsula and features an all-local soundtrack. Music supervisor Sean Nelson (Harvey Danger) helped Shelton round up a stellar line-up of artists, including the Decemberists and the Lights [Nelson would star in Shelton's followup, My Effortless Brilliance].
Local singer/songwriter Laura Veirs, however, provides the bulk of the score, and her evocative songs are a perfect fit for Shelton's expressive visuals.
As Veirs recollects, "Once I met her, I instantly connected with her and wanted to get involved. She showed me some of her previous short films, and I liked those a lot, so I dove right into the project."
Aside from a cover of 1930s standard "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter," the rest of the material stems from Veirs' recordings Carbon Glacier and Year of Meteors. When we met to discuss the movie, Shelton enthused, "It's amazing. It just works so beautifully as soundtrack."
The experience of working together was so fulfilling that she followed up by shooting a video for "Magnetized," with plans to include it as a DVD extra.
A longtime Seattle resident, Shelton teaches at The Art Institute and expects to start shooting her second feature next summer.
Veirs, meanwhile, looks forward to more movie composing. She acknowledges, "It's not something I'd done prior to working with Lynn." Now it's one of her main objectives.
As for her fall plans: "My band the Tortured Souls and I are touring the West Coast, and then we're making our fifth record together." [The result was 2007's Saltbreakers.] Sadly for Seattleites, she intends to relocate to Portland afterward, but don't count out further collaborations between these two talented Northwesterners.
We Go Way Back opens at Seattle’s Varsity Theatre on September 15.
THE PRODUCERS: FILM PRODUCTION IN SEATTLE
We Go Way Back was produced by Seattle studio The Film Company. Founded in 2004 by filmmaker Gregg Lachow (The Seven Mysteries of Life), it's not to be confused with the Capitol Hill cinematheque Northwest Film Forum, which produced and entered the world of distribution with Robinson Devor's critically acclaimed Police Beat. The two non-profits are separate entities, although a pre-Film Company Lachow was recipient of the NWFF's first "Start-to-Finish" grant for his 1999 feature Money Buys Happiness.
As Lachow explains, "[The Film Company] greenlights artists, not projects. We don't read scripts or hear pitches." So far, they have produced one short and four features. (NYC's Cyan Pictures is distributing We Go Way Back.)
Their next feature release is Canadian director Guy Maddin's Seattle-filmed, silent effort Brand Upon the Brain!, which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival this fall. Then they'll begin working on The Part I Love the Best, to be directed by Lachow's wife, actress Megan Murphy.
Michael Seiwerath is NWFF's executive director, a post he took over from cofounder Jamie Hook in 2001. (Hook founded the organization with Deborah Girdwood in 1995.)
According to Seiwerath, "The NWFF has aided in the production of more than 500 films. Police Beat is the fifth Start-to-Finish feature film we have actively produced or co-produced, and we are in development on the sixth, [David Russo's] #2. We are looking to start a national art house film network, made of the cinematheques in North America." They are also working on a DVD release for Police Beat.
Endnote: I interviewed Lynn Shelton in person at Caffe Vita; Laura Veirs, Gregg Lachow, and Michael Seiwerath by email. We Go Way Back is available to stream on most every digital platform thanks to Factory 25. In case you're wondering what Maggie Brown has been up to, Paul Siple, who went to school with her at Garfield, provides the very cool answer.
Coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival and year-round art house programming in the Pacific Northwest.
Kathy Fennessy is former president of Seattle Film Critics Society, a Northwest Film Forum board member, and a Tomatometer-approved critic. She writes or has written for Amazon, Minneapolis's City Pages, Resonance, Rock and Roll Globe, Seattle Sound, and The Stranger.
