It's Punks Versus Skinheads in Jeremy Saulnier's Fast and Bloody Green Room

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).