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Punk rock thriller "Green Room" focuses more on the intensity fostered by live punk music than it does the actual sound and feeling of being at a punk show. Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier (" Blue Ruin ") explains/apologizes for his general approach to the punk scene in an early scene where fledgling rocker Pat ( Anton Yelchin ) explains why his band has no social media presence: you have to be at the show to experience what they're offering, otherwise the "texture" of the music is lost. Pat, an indecisive beta-male who only really comes alive after he witnesses a murder and is subsequently forced to defend his band from militant neo-Nazis, may deliberately sound pretentious. But he makes Saulnier's point for him. "Green Room" is an overly fussy thriller where dialogue is so direct, and shots are arranged in such a mannered way that you can't help but be distracted by their precision. This is an intentional flaw in Saulnier's otherwise flawlessly clean-burning machine. You have to take the bad with the good here: "Green Room" may be too schematic to fully capture the essence of its characters' groddy milieu, but it's also economically paced, and gorgeous. 

When you first meet Pat and his group, you can't help but be impressed with how aggressively money-minded they are. They're not exactly rolling in it, so this makes sense. They share the same phone, talk about gigs with pay rates in mind, and siphon gas from other cars' tanks as if they were old hands. They even get flustered when a booker interviews them for a college radio gig, and asks them a question as frivolous as "Name your desert island band." So when Pat accidentally sees a group of skinheads crowded around a dead body, it's no surprise that he and his group already have one foot out the door. They're all business, but so are the guys that are out to get them: the Nazi punks that lock Pat and his crew in a graffiti-covered changing room take orders from self-serious club owner Darcy Banker ( Patrick Stewart ), a guy that describes his club as a "movement, not a party." 

Saulnier frequently reminds viewers that neither his pro- or antagonists are walking ledger books, but rather scared people who happen to be too serious for their own goods. That's the essence of the punk scene according to "Green Room": a scene obsessed with authenticity populated by severe, self-made men. Saulnier earns some genuinely admirable, close-to-the-vest laughs whenever characters condescend to each other, like when Pat's group opens a set with the Dead Kennedys' "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" and their frontman whimpers "That was a cover" to an unsympathetic crowd of bigots.

Then again, Saulnier mimics his characters' OCD-level exactitude, and that's seriously distracting. It's one thing to focus on characters who treat every run-in like something they will eventually have to provide a list of itemized excuses for. It's another to film them as if every frame has to represent that compulsive mentality. Saulnier likes his characters' orderliness a bit too much. These guys count gun shells, investigate their enemies' pockets, peek under door slates, and do pretty much everything with their mission in mind. Pat's friends may stumble over their feet sometimes, but watching them talk like they know exactly what they're doing all the time makes them frequently seem like they're too high-functioning to live. 

Which brings me back to my original point: what kind of movie about punk rockers doesn't like punk music? Saulnier's movie uses punk music as background noise: the sounds of feedback, and death-metal growling gets under viewers' skin on a not-quite-subliminal level since those noises are frequently as loud as any given character's voice. We also only see Pat's group perform the above-mentioned cover: this sequence tellingly ends with a group of punks moshing/trampling each other in slow-motion, hip-to-hip and hand-to-shoulder. Saulnier emphasizes the aimless aggression inherent to punk music. And he does a fine job of getting viewers to stay in whatever moment they're in through a series of engrossing tracking shots and long takes. 

But Saulnier doesn't quite nail his film's main joke: how can you be young, brash and  conscientious at the same time? Saulnier's game cast—especially Yelchin and "Blue Ruin" star Macon Blair —makes it a little easier to believe these characters might exist within the context of a tongue-in-cheek thriller. But you'll never believe that Pat and his group could exist in real life. They're not just wound too tight to be punks, though that's partly it. These guys just don't make sense outside of "Green Room."

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in  The New York Times ,  Vanity Fair ,  The Village Voice,  and elsewhere.

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Film credits.

Green Room (2016)

Rated R for strong brutal graphic violence, gory images, language and some drug content.

Anton Yelchin as Pat

Imogen Poots as Amber

Patrick Stewart as Darcy

Alia Shawkat as Sam

Mark Webber as Daniel

Joe Cole as Reece

Macon Blair as Gabe

• Jeremy Saulnier

Cinematographer

• Sean Porter
• Julia Bloch
• Brooke Blair

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Green Room is the film equivalent of licking a public restroom floor. It’s great.

A punk band takes on white supremacists in this grungy new thriller.

by Emily St. James

Green Room is the cinematic equivalent of licking a public restroom floor. Naturally, I loved it.

The new film from the immensely promising young director Jeremy Saulnier pits a rock band against a bunch of neo-Nazis in the Pacific Northwest, who lock the band's members in the titular location and plan to kill them after they witness something they shouldn't have. The film brutally toys with your sympathies as the band members descend into hell, find unlikely allies, and then try to climb their way back out again. Not everybody will survive.

Green Room perfectly embodies the “not for everybody” label. It is unrepentantly nasty, laced with comedy so dark it burns, and filled with gross-out moments that will almost certainly turn your stomach. But somewhere in its black little heart, it has something interesting to say about human resiliency and the reckless moral code of youth. And at just over 90 minutes, it never overstays its welcome.

Green Room is especially interested in the limits of the human body and mind

The biggest mental hurdle most viewers will have to clear in watching Green Room is the somewhat unlikeliness of the band becoming trapped in the backstage location itself.

Essentially everything about the film’s premise — from the reason the group is playing a white supremacist bar in a small town to the way its neo-Nazi ownership traps them in the green room after the band members see something they shouldn’t have — feels just a little bit contrived. And it’s easy enough to nitpick, even as you’re watching the film, because Saulnier must go out of his way to make sure nobody in the band can use a cellphone at any time, which takes some doing.

But in the end, it doesn’t matter. Green Room trades in nightmare logic, where just because things are bad doesn’t mean they can’t get much, much worse, and where the economical character development of the film’s first 15 minutes is literally all you’re going to get before the movie starts blazing toward its conclusion.

At the center of Green Room is the question of endurance, of how much you’re willing to put up with to survive. Saulnier is fascinated by the limits of the human body, by the way bones snap and skin rips open to reveal blood beneath.

The film’s sporadic moments of violence are sudden and horrifying and squirm-inducing, as they should be. They’re bursts of blood and terror, and Saulnier cuts away from them just quickly enough, allowing you to see only what’s necessary to let your imagination take over in the worst possible way.

Still, he’s almost more interested in psychological endurance than in how much duct tape it takes to hold together a battered arm. He poses the question of why these characters continue to want to survive, even when it’s clear they’re probably done for.

What keeps people going when they descend into hell? What makes them want to escape?

The film posits that friends are wherever you can find them

By far the most fascinating character in Green Room is Amber ( Imogen Poots ), a white supremacist young woman who also witnesses said terrible thing and ends up locked in the green room with the band. (She doesn’t know them before this happens.)

Too often, the film’s depiction of white supremacists seems designed simply to give it villains who are easy to hate, a criticism that includes Amber. Her motivation for signing up with the white supremacists in the first place is that people of another race committed a horrible crime against her (we don’t find out what). In response to that, another character quips that it’s not like white people are treating her so well at the moment.

But Amber is also a key element of Saulnier’s central statement about human behavior conveyed in the film, which is that alliances, relationships, and motivations are all mutable.

Amber might have been one of the bad guys, were she on the other side of the door separating the band from her fellow neo-Nazis. But because she’s trapped inside the green room with them, she becomes a vital ally in times of trouble.

Saulnier is not excusing Amber’s worst self — though it’s definitely buried — but he does seem interested in the fact that so much of what she believes, or of what anybody believes in this film, is driven by circumstance. Be surrounded by white supremacists, and you might end up being a white supremacist yourself.

In particular, Saulnier doesn’t try to suggest that the members of the band are titans of morality themselves. They still play the show, even when they find out what kind of club they’re playing. They simply offer a nasty punk sneer to the crowd, expecting to very soon be on their way.

Of course, in the universe of Saulnier’s movies (which includes his breakthrough film, the 2014 thriller Blue Ruin ) the bottom is always just about to drop out.

Exploring the good guys, the bad guys, and everybody else

One of the most interesting things about Green Room is that it defines its heroes precisely by making them not the villains. As led by Darcy ( Patrick Stewart , clearly relishing the chance to play someone so vile), the neo-Nazis are so self-evidently terrible that all other human beings become less so in comparison.

The band itself has a couple of familiar faces in it — Anton Yelchin of the new Star Trek films and Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development fame — but it’s far more interesting as a collective (particularly once the band joins forces with Amber) than as anything else. The group might be screwed, but they keep making plans to escape, because no one wants to die at the hands of neo-Nazis who sic dogs on them.

Somewhere inside of Green Room , then, is a thoughtful consideration of not good versus evil, but normal versus evil. Again, the members of the band don’t want to cause a fuss. They just want to play the show and get out of town with money in hand. But, backs against the wall, they fight back anyway.

At times I found myself wishing that Green Room had more moral weight to it — that it had presented the neo-Nazis as something other than cartoon supervillains, meant to be so bad that we’d applaud when they were bloodily dispatched. But the more I considered Green Room in that context, the more I realized I was barking up the wrong tree.

Green Room tilts the moral spectrum of good guys versus bad guys so far toward the evil end that punk kids who are simply trying to live their lives and play with their band become the de facto “good.”

The more I’ve thought about that, the more I’ve realized how frequently it’s true — how so often those who stand up to tyranny aren’t moral heavyweights at all but restless kids who just want to live in a slightly less terrible world. They might not stand up right away, or even all at once, but once they’re cornered, there’s no force harder to repel.

Green Room is playing in New York and Los Angeles. It expands throughout the country on April 29.

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Movie Reviews

'green room': a choreographed thriller with a spontaneous beat.

Scott Tobias

Joe Cole, Callum Turner, Alia Shawkat and Anton Yelchin in Green Room . Scott Patrick Green/Courtesy of A24 Films hide caption

Joe Cole, Callum Turner, Alia Shawkat and Anton Yelchin in Green Room .

There's a great running joke in Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room where a college journalist from the Pacific Northwest asks members of The Ain't Rights, a touring punk band from Arlington, Va., what they'd choose as their "desert island" band. The expected answers might be Black Flag or Misfits or Minor Threat, but after giving it some thought, their choices are mostly popular favorites like Prince or Madonna, street credibility be damned. The implication is that punk doesn't fully live on a record, where its energy and spontaneity are inherently bottled up. It has to be experienced in the moment, with screaming amps and a mosh pit roiling with anger, ecstasy, sweat and violence.

Fans of hard-hitting siege thrillers like Straw Dogs or Assault on Precinct 13 may well anoint Green Room a "desert island" movie one day, but Saulnier's commitment to visceral, gory, in-the-moment jolts channels the punk spirit to exceptional effect. Much like Saulnier's last movie, the Coens-esque revenge tale Blue Ruin, Green Room thrusts ordinary people into a desperate situation and watches, in horror and bemusement, as they messily improvise their way through it. The film's "punk versus skinheads" hook gives it the quality of a blood-spattered graphic novel, but there's a sophistication to the writing and direction that transcends brute conflict. The thrills aren't entirely cheap.

For one, Green Room suggests that Saulnier could have made a road movie about the travails of a modern-day punk band and left it at that. The film opens with The Ain't Rights — Pat (Anton Yelchin), Sam (Alia Shawkat), Reece (Joe Cole) and Tiger (Callum Turner) — stalled out in a cornfield en route to their latest gig. With no money to fill the tour van, they've been siphoning gas from parked cars to inch their way farther down the road. When they finally make it to town for the show, they're shuffled into a restaurant/bar — shades of the Bilgewater's chain in Hedwig and the Angry Inch — and come away with a door cut of less than $10 apiece. Feeling guilty, the poor kid who made the arrangements gets them booked at a skinhead bar where they can net $350.

The Ain't Rights are anxious to leave immediately after they arrive at this isolated spot — and the white-power types in the audience offer a mixed reception to their set. But when Sam witnesses the aftermath of a murder backstage, she and the band are not allowed to go, and their only ally is Amber (Imogen Poots), the victim's emotionally shattered best friend. Vastly outnumbered and outgunned, they enter into a series of tense negotiations with the bar's proprietor, Darcy (Patrick Stewart, cast both to type and far against it), who narrows their options before taking them off the table altogether.

The symbols and ideology of backwoods white supremacists are treated more as window dressing than social commentary, which firmly aligns Green Room with a long tradition of exploitation thrillers. Saulnier is more interested in working through the bad chemistry of a punk scene where malcontents from across the political spectrum can sometimes occupy the same space. Mostly, though, Saulnier excels at writing his heroes into a corner, sometimes literally, and figuring out ingenious ways to keep them in the fight. He doesn't cheat around the problem through trap doors or other such magical happenstance, and he doesn't turn The Ain't Rights and Amber into superhumans once their lives are at stake. They try and often they fail, with gut-wrenching consequences.

Though cannily engineered as a crowd pleaser — it could be seen as a Die Hard for viewers with stronger stomachs — Green Room has an abiding punk spirit that informs every aspect of the production. It's cut to a tight 93 minutes, made tighter by jagged edits that always come a beat or two before they might be anticipated. Saulnier also counts on the audience to be smart and aware of genre conventions, so he can defy them at every turn; as with Blue Ruin, human error scuttles best-laid plans and payoffs come only after a series of desperate contingencies. The secret to Green Room is that it's an expertly choreographed thriller that feels like it's being made up on the fly. It takes a lot of careful planning to be this spontaneous.

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Green Room Reviews

Committed performances, sharp dialogue, a gripping blend of the visceral and the heartfelt, and a credible sense of authenticity all add up to deliver an indie-grindcore night out to remember.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 18, 2024

One wild, unexpected ride the whole way through, with a brutally satisfying ending.

Full Review | Feb 22, 2023

Green Room doesn't shy away from the violence and shocks, creating some relentlessly disturbing aesthetics. The cast is stellar and the suspense keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Full Review | Oct 28, 2022

As a whole the story is pretty simple, even a bit familiar. But once you dig in, you realize this thing has a pulse all its own. And once you’re in its grip it doesn’t let go.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 21, 2022

Green Room has sensitivity and empathy to spare, but it’s also hard and unforgiving as steel, because it knows that’s the way the world is.

Full Review | Jun 16, 2022

An intelligent, well-made, and relentless thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 15, 2022

Jeremy Saulnier's new film Green Room is a triumph in edge of your seat thrills and nail-biting suspense.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Nov 5, 2021

Short on depth but long on visceral thrills, it's Old Testament moviemaking, with the adage about an eye for an eye expanding to also include arms, legs, torsos and, once killer dogs are introduced, even jugulars.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 18, 2021

Not even the whimper of a wounded dog can humanize some characters, no matter how cheap the sentiment might be.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 28, 2021

Wound tighter than a top E string, Green Room is not just a great twist on the gory survival thriller - it's a great gory survival thriller full stop.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 8, 2021

GREEN ROOM stands as home to one of the finest hours of a stupendous actor who died way too young, a fine villainous turn from one of the all-time great performers, and tense, unforgettable filmcraft.

Full Review | Apr 16, 2021

A nasty piece of work, a tense Tasmanian Devil tornado of a movie with solid performances and a DIY feel that meshes perfectly with its punk rock heart.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 3, 2021

Green Room is full of adrenaline, with an outstanding cast, and a pace that leaves you craving for more.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 1, 2021

Green Room makes no wrong decisions, and too few right ones. It retreats when it needs to advance. The danger for the characters is palpable enough, but the film itself never feels dangerous...

Full Review | Jan 6, 2021

Stewart is incredibly understated in his performance, which is effective yet disappointing, considering this provided an occasion to play an extremely against-type role.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Dec 4, 2020

A sordid, ultra-violent thrill ride of a movie.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 13, 2020

A compact, streamlined, punch-you-in-the-teeth thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 3, 2020

[A] grimy punk-siege masterpiece that would make John Carpenter proud.

Full Review | Apr 1, 2020

Green Room is savage genre filmmaking, but behind the maulings and murder is intelligence and quiet morality. This film proves again that Jeremy Saulnier is one of the most dynamic and interesting filmmakers working today.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2020

Green Room is punk as hell, and it makes me eager to see Saulnier's next outing.

Full Review | Jan 13, 2020

Previous Story

• Entertainment
• Movie Review

Green Room is a bloody, glorious punks vs. nazis fantasy

Blue ruin director jeremy saulnier returns for all-out war.

• By Emily Yoshida
• on April 13, 2016 09:07 am

It's a tough road, that of the principled DIY punk act in 2016. That's not just a polite way of saying punk is dead; but it's true that the way punk traditionally approaches disruption does feel out of step with our sleek, contemporary Muskian understanding of the term. Our current cultural discourse favors the technologically and economically savvy. To today's internet-hardened young adult, politically angry art that has not been safely swaddled in a layer of conceptual absurdity or economic viability can engender a "good for you" at best, a twinge of vicarious embarrassment at worst. A band who gets in front of a crowd of 20 like-minded individuals at a house show or a dive bar and howls about our racist, militaristic, capitalist society seem like the least likely candidates to overthrow it.

Making action heroes out of crust punks

In that way, and that way alone, Jeremy Saulnier's grisly thriller Green Room is a fantasy. The film's heroes are a struggling DC-based band called The Ain't Rights, far from home in the rural Pacific Northwest on a quintessential microband disaster tour. Hand-drawn posters, cheap beer hangovers, $20 payouts from shitty bookers, gas siphoning, couch crashing with the odd kind stranger — to some viewers there will be a wistful nostalgia to it all; but it's clear The Ain't Rights are in a bit of limbo. There's some disagreement among the band, for example, about their decision to not use social media. ("You guys are hard to find," a college radio host tells them ominously, early in the film.) There's never the explosive, fatigue-driven "why are we doing this?" fight, but one can feel it lurking in their rumbling van. This changes, of course, when one particular kind stranger leads them to a well-paying show at a neo-nazi venue deep in the Oregon woods.

If you've seen the trailer, or Saulnier's 2013 revenge tragedy Blue Ruin, you know things are bound to go awry. But at first, the gig is strangely energizing — The Ain't Rights finally have an audience they can really piss off, and they do so in short order, opening with the Dead Kennedys' "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" and in return getting a round of beer bottles tossed in their direction. It's the kind of antagonistic thrill the band has clearly been seeking. And once they've proven their hardness they end up winning over the crowd; insofar as they can provide a pummeling soundtrack for some afternoon moshing.

What gets them locked in the titular backstage cell has nothing to do with their performance; it's just a stroke of dumb bad luck. But it nevertheless still causes that transactional truce to drop, and nazis and punks are once again pitted against each other; with the former stopping at nothing until the latter are exterminated. Arms are lacerated, bones snapped, skulls are stabbed, and not everyone makes it out alive, but The Ain't Rights certainly make good on the promise of their opening number.

When Breaking Bad brought neo-nazis in as the Big Bad of the final season, many critics balked. Nobody would call Vince Gilligan's drama a subtle show —€” this is a series in which a man's severed head once walked in on the back of a turtle and then exploded —€” but its villains were always given enough context to at least help us understand what led them to be the ruthless cartel leaders or chicken tycoons we meet on the show. Nazis are nazis, on the other hand — obviously the worst, rarely used as vessels of complex morality.

And so, while Green Room shares an aesthetic sensibility with his last film (he shot and directed all his features), Saulnier is up to something very different this time around — something simpler, perhaps, but more immediately satisfying. It's clear the director has an affinity for the classical; Blue Ruin played out like a Greek tragedy, a series of unfortunate decisions, each spiraling out of another. It could have been told from the point of view of the family Dwight (Macon Blair, who also stars in this film) finds himself battling and been just as tragic and complex. Green Room , meanwhile, is a war story à la the  Battle of Thermopylae , in which a vastly outnumbered group facing strategically unfavorable spatial circumstances set out for an impossible victory. The Ain't Rights don't have any murky moral crises about their mission —€” they just want to get the hell out of the green room and the nazi bunker and take out as many skinheads as they need to on their way.

The outsized circumstances end up making it funnier, too — the film has a kind of locked-jaw sardonic sense of humor that is the perfect counterbalance to its moody camerawork and soundtrack. It's not exactly a grindhouse Scott Pilgrim , but a recurring bit about "desert island bands" peppered throughout the carnage has some of that series' music-obsessive winkiness. A last-ditch defense against an attack dog is Looney Tunes- absurd, but also makes perfect sense. The film mines plenty by making action heroes out of crust punks; Imogen Poots' performance as an accidental ally to the band supposes how Twitter user @sosadtoday would hold up in guerrilla warfare. As the band's lead guitarist and idealistic center, Anton Yelchin provides the perfect stubborn counter to Patrick Stewart's Picard-meets-Fring nazi leader. Their negotiations across the green room door are nervy and hilarious, the rebellious freegan vs. the gentlemanly personification of evil.

A fantasy of righteous catharsis

But there's no irony or goofiness here. Saulnier stays clear-eyed as the body count rises, never not believing in his young protagonists. He's thrown them into the fight of their lives, giving them the opportunity to deliver a solid blow to the hatred they'd only rhetorically fought up until now. And they take their assignment deathly seriously. Green Room is hard as fuck, but it's also a fantasy of righteous catharsis. Perhaps in the next color-themed volume of what one can only assume is a loose  Kieslowskian trilogy, Saulnier can get back to the moral ambiguity. But for now, it's super fun to just put some bullets in some nazis.

Green Room opens in limited release this Friday, April 15.

Review by Brian Eggert April 30, 2016

Pitting a genuine hardcore punk bank against a gang of ruthless neo-Nazis in a film sounds like something you’d find while scrolling through the many rungs of drivel on Netflix. Put that idea in the hands of an artist-filmmaker like Jeremy Saulnier, whose slow-burner Blue Ruin was an essential thriller from 2014, and you get Green Room , an unrelenting siege of shocking violence and intractable characters. Marked by the same undercurrent of comic irony found in his previous release, Saulnier’s third feature (his debut was the extremely low-budgeted Murder Party , 2007) is efficient and tense as films get, leaving all unnecessary information off the screen. Green Room also boasts an incredible cast, no end of surprises in spite of what might seem like a predictable conflict, and a playful midnight movie setup delivered with Saulnier’s sharp formal precision.

Take the early sequence when one of the Ain’t Rights, the band name of the film’s East Coast punk rockers, drops the needle on the edge of a record to start a bash of hard-drinking fun. Rather than see the revelry, there’s a jump cut to the next morning, when the needle has played through to the record’s interior. Instead of watching the entire party, we only needed to see that it took the length of a vinyl album for the Ain’t Rights to get drunk and pass out. That’s clever filmmaking, and only about two seconds of the film. Green Room ’s first shot finds the band’s ramshackle touring van driven halfway into a corn field, the driver having passed out. Siphoning gas from vehicles to make their low-key tour dates, the band prides itself on a raw punk philosophy. They avoid social media and marketing, play gigs for a few bucks per person, and embrace the live music experience.

Of course, there’s a touch of artifice inherent to a modern day punk band forcing themselves into the nasty lifestyle of yesteryear’s musical renegades. After all, these are millennials who carefully adopt a lived-in pretense. Saulnier uses this artificial characteristic once the film turns into a bloodbath and our guitar heroes are forced into a real-life situation. Turquoise-haired singer Tiger (Callum Turner) seems the most punk-stalwart of them all, followed by the hotheaded drummer Reece (Joe Cole), whereas bassist-manager Sam (Alia Shawkat) seems more level-headed, and guitarist Pat (Anton Yelchin) remains most sympathetic. Together, they drive out to the sticks to play a pickup gig for cash at a white-power club, although the aerial views of the drive there make it feel like they’re headed to The Overlook Hotel in The Shining.

Once again, Saulnier’s title represents the majority of the film’s setting: a room in the back of a dingy club owned by “a movement, not a party” of fascists deep in the forests of Oregon. The Ain’t Rights open with a big F-U to the crowd, playing The Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” to a throng of white supremacists. Despite the insult, their set goes on without incident—and they could have left scot-free had they not seen a dead body lying in the club’s green room, at which point the employees, including the gun-toting Big Justin (Eric Edelstein), hurry the band into the titular room and lock the door, refusing to let them leave. There’s a strange calmness to the clan holding the band. “We’re not keeping you,” they claim. “You’re just staying .” And the band cannot help but believe the lies during the initial negotiation process, if only because they’re so afraid that they must believe there’s a way to escape this horrifying situation.

The reasons for the murder and the band’s detainment are revealed over time, but the tension comes from the gradual breakdown of several characters who are trapped, and later consider the green room refuge from the neo-Nazis, along with fellow prisoner Amber (Imogen Poots). Saulnier’s villains are every bit as developed as the Ain’t Rights; he turns the screw by portraying them as organized and layered in spooky ways. Macon Blair, star of Blue Ruin , once again uses his everyman looks and weak, compassionate eyes to create a curiously sympathetic skinhead, Gabe. Whereas Kai Lennox plays Clark, the wrangler of pit bulls trained to attack at his German-language order (we come to dread the command “fass”, meaning bite). These two, and a small army of skinheads, are devoted to the film’s most terrifying character: Patrick Stewart plays against type as Darcy, the cold, calculating organizer and overseer who has the unquestioned devotion of his “Red Laces”—youthful drones identified by the red shoe laces they earn after demonstrating their worthiness to Darcy. To be sure, Darcy is a far cry from Captain Picard or Professor X.

The film’s two opposing, nonconformist attitudes make for a clash of ultra-violent, increasingly gruesome attacks. Saulnier never hints at who will die next, and indeed, no one is safe from Green Room ’s barrage of machetes, box cutters, guns, and bloodthirsty dogs. When death arrives onscreen, it’s unceremonious and unflinching—and what’s more, realistic looking. The fleshy, meaty wounds left on an arm by a machete will forever be burned on the mind of Green Room ’s audience; the effect demands audible groans and gasps from the audience (this critic among them). Saulnier’s treatment contains a Carpenter-esque quality, adopting those claustrophobic situations explored in Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Ghosts of Mars (2001), where two unlikely characters band together against a common enemy. Although Saulnier doesn’t deconstruct his characters as thoroughly as he did in Blue Ruin , the affable cast members lend a wealth of presence. Green Room seems more interested in taking apart the punk and fascist façades, ultimately determining the more dangerous and scary of them are the white supremacists who live and breathe their upsetting dogma, whereas punk rockers have adopted their regime as an image.

An amusing ongoing joke develops in the form a conversation asking, “What’s your desert island band?” The answers are shared and changed over time, revealing much about our characters given their choices throughout the discussion. It’s these kind of moments that make Saulnier’s writing crisp and smart, while his technical filmmaking is equally sharp. Green Room bows confident lensing by cinematographer Sean Porter, appropriately green-hued for much of the film, and composed, gritty production design by Ryan Warren Smith. Having won several small awards and praise on the festival circuit in 2015, Green Room is sure to find a devoted audience over time, turning this into the cultish row it wants to be. Nevertheless, Saulnier’s third film manages to be much more than a prime selection for Midnight Movie Madness, requiring more serious moviegoing crowds to seek out this title for a rare sampling of an intelligent, well-made, and relentless thriller.

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Green Room : Escape From the Nazi Punks

Jeremy Saulnier’s taut, gory thriller follows a band trapped in a rock venue by white supremacists after witnessing a crime.

The main takeaway of the film Green Room is simple: There are few situations more hellish than being trapped for 16 hours in a music venue by a gang of murderous neo-Nazis in the Oregon backwoods. The story follows the members of the hardcore band The Ain’t Rights—Pat, Tiger, Reece, and Sam, whose lean names befit their means. Low on gas, money, and energy, the band reluctantly agrees to one final gig, the catch being it’s at a white-supremacist club just outside of Portland. The musicians aren’t thrilled, but at least Pat (Anton Yelchin) recognizes what may be the only upside to their situation: How often does a band get the chance to cover the Dead Kennedys song   “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” in front of a crowd of actual Nazi punks?

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But the fun doesn’t last: Minutes after their set ends, the band witness a brutal crime and realize their odds of getting home have just dropped dramatically. The venue’s owner, Darcy (played by Sir Patrick Stewart), mobilizes his most devoted foot-soldiers to take care of the outsiders. What follows is a tense gore-fest, one that’s as grimy and claustrophobic as the titular room. But scrape off the scum, and you’ll find Green Room full of visual artistry, dark humor, smart writing, and glints of humanity. The film’s bleakness and B-movie trappings won’t appeal to everyone: The violence reaches demented heights, and having the antagonists be neo-Nazis may come off as lazy storytelling. But there’s a cool, macabre charm to the whole effort. In short, Green Room has all the makings of a cult classic—one likely to find enthusiastic fans sooner rather than later.

Saulnier’s third feature film, Green Room bears many of the same sensibilities and characteristics as the director’s first two works, 2007’s slasher comedy Murder Party and the infinitely improved, Kickstarter-funded drama Blue Ruin , which was the indie success story of 2013. The latter—a Coen Brothers-esque tale about a man seeking vengeance for his parents’ murders—revealed Saulnier’s deftness at both writing dialogue and cultivating silence, at knowing the exact moments to hold back or to let the action spill forth. On the surface, Green Room has more in common with Saulnier’s messier debut, but it retains the cinematic flair and self-assuredness of Blue Ruin.

Green Room is very much the kind of film where each new development seems to dare the audience to think, “Well, it can’t get any worse than this,” before proving them wrong. As the full weight of their situation begins to sink in, The Ain’t Rights grow increasingly desperate, making dumb decisions as often as they make smart ones. Green Room keeps total hopelessness at bay, though, by making everything feel like a puzzle to be solved.

Saulnier doesn’t rely on character backstories or arcs to build empathy—he operates entirely on the assumption that seeing ordinary people trying to beat extraordinary circumstances is enough to make viewers care whether they live or die. A risky approach, but it works, turning Sam, Pat, Reece, Tiger, and their new companion Amber into audience proxies. It’s easy to care precisely because of how un -special they are. The realistic, often clumsy ways they try to outsmart the latest machete-wielding maniac or killer dog inspires white-knuckled viewing or a nauseated groan when things go wrong.

The film wouldn’t have worked half as well without the stellar performances of its cast. As Pat, Yelchin ( Alpha Dog , the Star Trek reboot) lurches between defeated and defiant, and turns out to be the closest thing the band has to a leader. Imogen Poots ( 28 Weeks Later , Frank and Lola ) is unreasonably charming as Amber, the band’s new ally, and Alia Shawkat (yep, Maeby Funke from Arrested Development ) plays up Sam’s levelheaded cool amid chaos. The skinhead lackey Gabe (the delightful Macon Blair, Saulnier’s longtime collaborator and friend) goes about fixing his boss’s problem as though it’s just another crappy day at the office. Meanwhile, Stewart takes a Gus Fring approach to his role as the neo-Nazi leader—trading a louder caricature of evil for quieter, matter-of-fact menace.

After a certain point in the film, it becomes clear there are only a couple possible endgames. But despite the apparent narrowing of options for the film’s heroes, Green Room delivers one little surprise after another and maintain its frenetic pace. There are much-needed respites scattered throughout, too. The camera occasionally leaves the harshly lit, industrial interiors of the venue to sweep over the soft lushness of the Oregon outdoors. And there’s a good supply of black comedic moments, deadpan retorts, and scenes that become just absurd enough to defuse the ever-building tension. (“I can’t die here with you,” Pat tells Amber at one point. “So don’t,” she replies.)

Saulnier revels in every part of his film—the minimally stylized violence, the hardcore soundtrack, the vulnerability and resourcefulness of his characters—in a way that suggests a deeper personal connection. Indeed, after a screening in Washington, D.C., Saulnier talked about growing up in Alexandria, Virginia, making zombie movies in the streets and later becoming part of the punk-rock scene (The Ain’t Rights are from the nearby city of Arlington). The crowd was filled with old friends, family, and acquaintances, many resembling the tattooed or mohawked or leather-jacketed characters onscreen. A strange tenderness comes through in Green Room , as if the film were a kind of love letter from Saulnier to his younger days.

The movie’s raw appeal, though, stands on its own. Green Room doesn’t traffic in symbols or deeper meanings. There is only survival and death, and the film reminds audiences of how productive the tension between the two can be without much narrative decoration. While queasier types should stay away, fans of gritty siege movies or stripped-down horror will probably find Green Room to be one of the more memorable movies of the year.

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Green Room Movie Review — A tense thriller that pits punks against Nazis

Tense, grizzly, and incredibly well-made,  green room   is a unique and incredibly strong entry in the thriller genre..

What can I say about Jeremy Saulnier's dark and twisted  Green Room   that hasn't already been said? It's a movie that has never truly existed until now. Maybe the general premise has, but the way Saulnier tackles it is unique in almost every way. However, it's this point-of-view of non-violent violence that I find the most interesting. He doesn't linger on the violence or the gore of the film, which is impressive considering there's a lot of it. Instead, he focuses on the characters and the story, which could easily fade into the background. This careful perspective makes Green Room  one of the most successful genre films in the last few years.

After a performance goes bad, they take a gig at a neo-Nazi punk bar. Yeah, they're not the sharpest tools in the shed. However, after spending some intimate moments with them during the beginning of the film, you realize that they're taking the gig out of necessity. Needless to say, things don't go quite as planned. After their set, during which they hilariously play “Nazi Punks F*ck Off,” Pat stumbles on a crime committed by one of the guys in the club. They are locked in the green room and must figure out how to escape before the fearsome Nazi leader Darcy ( Patrick Stewart ) arrives with reinforcements. It's punks vs. Nazis.

Unsurprisingly, it gets ugly – blades, dogs, and all. But not in the way you'd think.

Green Room   is a movie that deserves to be rewatched. It's really hard to articulate how well-made this movie is. I've watched it at least five times and still want to come back for more. There's just so much in it to dissect and so many details to discover. Every time I watch it, I find something new or learn something different about a character. I see something happening in the background of a scene or a detail in the set. It's a thoroughly realized piece of film that will hopefully retain the acclaim it has received. And, for the record, my desert island band would be…

Green Room  is available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and digital on Amazon!

Karl Delossantos

Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

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In ‘Green Room,’ This Band Could Be Their Death

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By Joe Coscarelli

• April 7, 2016

Blood, guts and punk rock are the accent notes in “ Green Room ,” a new thriller that brings throwback niches — the violent exploitation and siege films of the 1970s and the earnest, do-it-yourself hardcore punk bands of the 1980s — into the present day. Think a mash-up of “Straw Dogs” and “Our Band Could Be Your Life,” pitting low-level suburban musicians against white-supremacist skinheads, all in tight quarters.

This straight-ahead genre exercise is decidedly “not tongue-in-cheek,” said Jeremy Saulnier, the film’s writer and director, who combined his youthful interests in John Carpenter and the brash, underground rock of his local Washington scene into a movie that uses an esoteric music subculture for texture without romanticizing it.

“You fear that as you get older, your connections to your youth start to wane and disappear,” Mr. Saulnier, 39, said recently in a Brooklyn cafe near his home. “I didn’t want to lose that perspective.”

So after the critical success of his self-financed second feature, “Blue Ruin,” which was well-received at Cannes in 2013, Mr. Saulnier fended off overtures from the big studios to instead make a scrappy independent movie set in a dying milieu — the film’s fictional band shuns social media and aspires to release vinyl — before nobody else did. (“Green Room” opens on Friday, April 15.)

Other than in documentaries, Mr. Saulnier said, “I’ve never seen a hardcore scene depicted” in a movie. “I had to make a film that I honestly believed no one else would ever make.”

Anatomy of a Scene: 'Green Room'

Jeremy saulnier narrates a sequence from his film..

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Common sense media reviewers.

Gory, brutally violent, but well-made horror/thriller.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Takes the position that using brutal violence in s

Characters are all capable of great violence and a

Extremely strong, gory violence: Dead, bloody corp

Many uses of "f--k," "s--t," the "N" word, "mother

Beer drinking in social situations.

Parents need to know that Green Room is an intensely violent thriller with horror elements that harkens back to the pulpy "grindhouse" days. There are grisly killings with knives, box cutters, machetes, guns, and killer dogs, accompanied by pooling, spurting blood. There's also lots of fighting, kicking, and…

Positive Messages

Takes the position that using brutal violence in self-defense is considered OK.

Positive Role Models

Characters are all capable of great violence and aren't above stealing.

Violence & Scariness

Extremely strong, gory violence: Dead, bloody corpses; pools of blood; spurting blood. Fighting, kicking, biting. Guns and shooting. Stabbing. Limbs broken. Slashed-up arm (repaired with duct tape). Stomach sliced with a box cutter. Killer dogs tear people apart. Machete to neck. Lots of loud, violent punk music. Violence against women.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Many uses of "f--k," "s--t," the "N" word, "motherf----r," "goddamn," "f----t," "ass," "jizz."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Green Room is an intensely violent thriller with horror elements that harkens back to the pulpy "grindhouse" days. There are grisly killings with knives, box cutters, machetes, guns, and killer dogs, accompanied by pooling, spurting blood. There's also lots of fighting, kicking, and gory wounds (one slashed-up arm is repaired with duct tape). Language includes many uses of "f--k," "s--t," and the "N" word, and there's a lot of violent, expletive-filled music. Characters drink in social situations, but sex isn't an issue. If teens know star Patrick Stewart from Star Trek: The Next Generation and the X-Men movies, they'll get a very different impression here. Still, while the material is extremely intense, this is also a very well-made movie with believable characters, and it's likely that it could become a word-of-mouth hit. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 3 parent reviews

Compelling but brutally gory

Good but very gory thriller, what's the story.

Punk rock band The Ain't Rights -- bassist Pat ( Anton Yelchin ), guitarist Sam ( Alia Shawkat ), drummer Reece (Joe Cole), and singer Tiger ( Callum Turner ) -- are on tour, but they're not even scraping together enough money for gas. When a key gig falls through, a journalist gets them a replacement one playing a backwoods Portland club for white supremacists. After unwisely playing a Dead Kennedys cover song ("Nazi Punks F--- Off"), the band prepares to make a hasty exit ... when they become witnesses to a brutal murder in the green room. Trapped inside with a stranger ( Imogen Poots ) while the supremacists' sinister, calculating leader ( Patrick Stewart ) schemes, the bandmates must think on their feet in order to survive.

Is It Any Good?

Influenced by exploitation movies of the 1970s (and punk music of the 1980s), this horror-thriller is rooted in a gripping, grisly kind of realism without resorting to lazy coincidence or stupidity. Director Jeremy Saulnier previously made the similarly excellent Blue Ruin ; here he continues honing his skills as a maker of exceptional genre movies that are both entertaining and involving. GREEN ROOM conjures up a vivid atmosphere, introducing characters that feel like they're living in it, rather than just performing in it.

These characters have history -- such as when one band member's wrestling skills come in handy -- and their decisions carry real weight. Saulnier's use of compressed time and space (the movie is set over one long day and mainly in one room) lend the story an air of urgency, while darkness and sounds (barking dogs) add to the unsettling soundtrack. The cast is outstanding, but it's Stewart who with this performance instantly becomes one of the screen's most haunting villains, spreading hatred with soft-spoken precision.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Green Room 's extreme violence . What effect does it have? What purpose does it serve? What's the impact of media violence on kids? Does that impact change as kids get older?

Is the movie scary ? How does something like this compare to a movie with more supernatural horrors?

How does it feel to see Patrick Stewart playing such a frightening, hateful villain?

Movie Details

• In theaters : April 15, 2016
• On DVD or streaming : July 12, 2016
• Cast : Patrick Stewart , Anton Yelchin , Imogen Poots
• Director : Jeremy Saulnier
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : A24
• Genre : Thriller
• Run time : 94 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong brutal graphic violence, gory images, language and some drug content
• Last updated : January 7, 2024

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Green Room Review

13 May 2016

Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier is among the most inventive, versatile filmmakers working in low-budget, indie genre movies. Following break-out black comedy and revenge noir, he’s expertly turned to siege mechanics with this powerful suspense picture.

An opening sequence deftly establishes our heroes, The Ain’t Rights, as defiant followers of the punk flame while explaining the Blues Brothers-like misunderstandings that get them booked to play a far right (“technically extreme left”) club. Opening their set with a cover of the Dead Kennedys’ Nazi Punks Fuck Off might seem suicidal, but their nerve creepily wins over a few of the audience, including the spaced-out screwdriver-murderer who fronts the house band.

Effectively meshes spiky suspense and action with blackly comic touches.

Post gig, after stumbling over a corpse, The Ain’t Rights hole up in the green room with the dead girl’s friend Amber (Imogen Poots, with a neo-Nazi haircut) and bouncer Big Justin (Eric Edelstein) who they take hostage. Put upon manager Gabe (Saulnier’s recurring star Macon Blair) calls in his boss, Darcy (Stewart, relishing a chance to be evil for once), to negotiate or murder away the problem.

Like many great siege movies, this alternates edgy conversations with bursts of action as both sides work out plans to break in or get away and then have to think fast when things go south. There are shock-gore moments a-plenty, and the order in which characters are culled isn’t entirely guessable.

There are also hidden depths to the line-up of musos and skinhead thugs, with the presence of softie indie-drama types Anton Yelchin (the world’s worst inspirational speaker) and Alia Shawkat (a motormouth cleverclogs guitarist with a secret fondness for Simon & Garfunkel) hinting their characters might not be the hardnut outcasts they outwardly claim – which later adds to the suspense as they reveal unexpected capabilities.

It’s no more an in-depth look at the American neo-Nazi scene than Precinct 13 was a sociological study of LA gangs (though it has some unsettling specifics — “Red laces only,” Darcy insists when calling in his troops), but with it so effectively meshing spiky suspense and action with blackly comic touches, who really needs it to be?

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Green Room enacts a “what would you do” premise, demonstrating what happens when a punk band gets a gig at a skinhead venue, comes across a murder scene, and tries to flee.

Very much in the spirit of Panic Room, Green Room falls into the escape genre of horror. A thriller, its main characters spend most of the time locked in a tight space. The film is a battle of wills between The Ain’t Rights and neo-Nazi leader Darcy ( Patrick Stewart ). Despite the film’s premise being steeped in politics, the film itself is far more stripped down and primal. Above all, it focuses on the element of survival.

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While the film begins with a reasonably large ensemble cast , especially considering its tight sets, it does not take long for characters to begin dropping. The film proves itself unafraid of killing people off, demonstrating the very real threat Darcy poses to the main characters. One by one, people die in failed escape attempts, so by the end the only remaining survivors that stand a chance are lead singer Pat (Anton Yelchin) and skinhead-turned-ally Amber (Imogen Poots).

What Happens In Green Room’s Ending

With the death of Sam (Alia Shawkat), the skinheads have what they need to enact their plan, including the The Ain’t Right’s van keys. Darcy declares that three of the four dead band members are enough to stage the crime scene he’s been planning. Off to work on that, he teases Gabe (Macon Blair) with the prospect of earning his red shoelaces and leaves him behind with two other skinheads to get dispose of the remaining survivors.

Pat and Amber commiserate in the now-destroyed green room, where Pat delivers a speech about surviving an outmatched paintball game that rouses them into action. They paint their faces and lay a trap, managing to kill their hunters and take Gabe as a hostage. Gabe double-crosses the skinheads to call the police while Pat and Amber ambush Darcy and his compatriots, managing to kill all three. As Pat and Amber wait for the police, Pat is finally able to decide on a desert island band, a callback to the radio interview that eventually led him down the road to here.

What Is Pat’s Desert Island Band?

Although the character never says the name of the band in the movie, many believe that the credit cut to “Sinister Purpose” hints that the answer is Creedence Clearwater Revival. In a Reddit AMA, director Jeremy Saulnier confirmed that CCR was one of two correct answers. The second, he explained, was a song he whispered in Yelchin’s ear on set that remained a secret between director and actor.

Related: Rob Zombie's 3 From Hell Ending Explained

What Was Darcy’s Plan?

Darcy only ever let members of The Ain’t Right die at the mercy of trained attack dogs. The band is shown siphoning gas at the start of the film, foreshadowing what Darcy uses against them to develop his case. Darcy intended to frame the death of the band as a result of their trespassing. The members were staged siphoning gas, while the dogs were let loose to create the illusion of an accident.

What Do The Red Laces Represent?

Twice the movie talks about red laces: once when Darcy refers to the new protocol being “ red lace only ” and once when he offers physical shoelaces to Gabe. Through this, audiences can understand red laces as some marker of different levels of experience and trust in the skinhead world. Green Room is explicit in marking Darcy’s group neo-Nazis, including throwaway lines about “race workshops” on Wednesdays. Like many movies, Green Room borrows certain concepts from real life. Red laces are a real skinhead concept that refer to when someone has spilled blood for the skinhead movement. Those who wear them have to “earn” them by enacting violence that leads to bloodshed , hence the red color.

Why Do Amber and Pat Paint Their Faces?

Pat tells a story over the course of the film about a paintball incident in which he and friends were up against war veterans and losing badly until one of them went wild and stopped playing by the rules. This is a story lifted directly out of Saulnier’s life, in which he describes the success of this “ goody Rambo raid ”. It was in breaking the rules of cover and battle that the wild player was able to lead his team to victory, despite the odds. Amber and Pat take inspiration from this concept. The skinheads have the upper hand, but they choose to play by their own rules. The face paint they don through the use of a permanent marker in part serves to elicit that Rambo vibe the director speaks of, but also works to indicate they are a team. It marks them as partners in a war they will fight how they please.

Green Room Explores What Punk Really Is

Although the inclusion of punk is certainly an aesthetic choice that borrows from the director’s own life experiences, it also plays into the movie’s themes . The punk rock movement, in real life, gained a serious skinhead following. The Ain’t Rights demonstrate their stance on this by playing a cover of the Dead Kennedys as their set opener, which basically tells Nazis to eff off. The song includes lyrics:

“ Punk ain't no religious cult

Punk means thinking for yourself

You ain't hardcore 'cause you spike your hair

When a jock still lives inside your head ”

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Although punk has a certain look, the song and the film posit that the look is only truly punk if it matches the interior. A hierarchical group of followers that all turn to Darcy when in doubt aren’t exactly “ thinking for [themselves] ”. It is telling that the idea of singing the cover to a group of skinheads was Pat’s , the only surviving band member at the end. The film further explores this concept in the band’s assessment of Tad (David Thompson), trying to decide if he is “legit” just because he wakes up at five to put “goop” in his hair. Pat is unable to decide on a desert island band early in the movie, but the revelation comes to him after he and Amber take down a skinhead organization, proving themselves the true survivors. The music and the actions go hand-in-hand.

The Real Meaning Of Green Room’s End

While the movie takes a clear anti-Nazi stance , it also comes down something much more primal: the urge to survive. The title itself is a clue. A green room is the place behind the performance, where performers go when not on-stage. It asks audiences to reflect on a what-if scenario . Green Room lets audiences live vicariously through a group of characters unfit for survival, with no experience in weaponry and escape, in a situation that forces them to either rise to the challenge or die trying.

Next: Hostel’s Alternate Ending Explained: Why It Was Cut

• Green Room (2016)

Why Green Room Was A Nightmare To Film, And Why It Was Worth It, According To Anton Yelchin

Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room is a crazy stressful movie. The entire movie basically hinges on a showdown between a punk band and a crew of murderous Neo-Nazis, and once the tension ratchets up to 10 in the first act, it doesn’t let up until the end credits begin to roll. Watching it, one can’t help but imagine that the intense atmosphere in the tone was reflected on the set, and you’d be 100 percent correct. In fact, Anton Yelchin told us that things got so bad on some days that members of the crew actually had to walk off the set and take a breath before continuing – but it was all worth it, because it just made the film that much better.

With Green Room now out in limited release and set to expand nationwide at the end of the month, I had the pleasure of hopping on the phone with Anton Yelchin to talk about the new film, and I took the opportunity to ask about exactly how the tension in the movie was created on set. The young actor pointed to the fact that the film – which is basically set over the course of 16 hours – was put together in just a little over 20 days, and that led to a high level of "concentration" during production that really put a certain kind of poison in the air. Said Yelchin,

If there’s just one person in the room, seven people in a room, that are putting out a lot of incredibly painful and volatile energy, you end up feeding off of that. There was a point which I looked around and Alia [Shawkat] was crying, Joe [Cole] was crying, Callum [Turner] was crying, Imogen [Poots] was crying. Eric [Edelstein] was on the ground, like suffocated and huffing and puffing, and I thought I was going to lose my mind. That was every day for 20 something days, and I think that inevitably, that’s what maintains that tension. I know that for the crew, there were days that they couldn’t watch. People walked out. There was really tough on everyone.

That’s a pretty damn vivid word picture, and hearing it I don’t think anyone would fault Anton Yelchin negatively looking back on the experience of making Green Room . Fortunately, that’s not the case, however. While the pressure was incredibly high, and the atmosphere on set incredibly stressful, Yelchin believes that it was ultimately what the movie needed in order to be as effective as the final cut is:

It registers that way on screen, so there’s really… you know, when I watched the film, and I’m hyper-critical, but it doesn’t feel false to me. It feels pretty, accordingly intense.

In the film, Anton Yelchin plays a member of a punk band that is wrapping up a show at a Neo-Nazi compound when they witness the end result of a murder. When they try and fail to call the authorities, they wind up getting trapped in the backstage green room, and must find a way to escape before the gun-toting skinheads kill them all. When you see the film for yourself, you will perfectly understand why the rough atmosphere pays off.

Green Room will expand to theaters nationwide on April 29th.

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What it's about

This is the follow-up film by the director of the (also) excellent and intense Blue Ruin . Like that film, Green Room often subverts genre expectations. The basic premise: a lefty punk band winds up taking a show at a skinhead club because they are desperate for cash. The show goes well, but afterward the band accidentally witnesses something they shouldn’t have and are trapped in the club’s green room. This film is brutal and intense, especially because you actually care about what happens to the characters. Bonus: Sir Patrick Stewart plays the leader of the skinhead organization, and gives a subtle yet effectively sinister performance. While some truly horrific acts of violence occur (especially in the back-half of the film) they really do serve the story. Still, there are a handful of scenes that may require more sensitive viewers to cover their eyes. You have been warned.

Nick Meumann

A struggling punk band is on tour and after one gig falls through, they are booked to play a venue in a remote area. They quickly realise they are Playing in a neo-nazi venue. While the brazen band initially taunts the neo-Nazi’s during their set, the movie quickly turns to a tense stand off after they walk in on a murder, and then a desperate fight for survival as the band are trapped in the green room of the venue.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Green Room

Article by: Robert Sommerfield

I wasn’t sure what to expect going into the theater to see Jeremy Saulnier’s third entry into his “inept protagonist trilogy” (the first two unconnected “parts” being Blue Ruin , released in 2013, and Murder Party from 2007). The basic premise, however, had me intrigued: a dirt-poor punk rock band, attempting to make gas money to their next show by playing a last minute gig at a bar (frequented and owned by Neo-Nazi skinheads), accidently witnesses something they weren’t suppose to see… and then must fight and survive their way to freedom.

From the get go, I was hooked. Being a fan of punk rock music and the punk rock scene itself, I quickly found myself vested in this world, its characters and their relationships. This is a gritty and honest look at the punk rock scene — not “Hollywood stylized.” You see what these guys are going through and what they have to do to continue on with their tour, from town to town, all in the span of the first twenty minutes.

All of that changes, however, once the real grit of the film starts: On their way out of their gig, one of the characters returns to a room they weren’t suppose to go into and witness the aftermath of a brutal murder. The movie switches gears and almost becomes an entirely different film. The next hour descends into a brutal nightmarish revenge film that will satisfy most horror and suspense fans.

All of this could easily have devolved into “B” movie territory if it weren’t for the amazing cast. Anton Yelchin and Imogen Poots (reunited after their underrated work on the Fright Night remake) make for strong protagonists that you find yourself quickly rooting for, while Patrick “Jean-Luc Picard” Stewart plays against type as the ice cold club owner and de facto skinhead leader. The acting is top notch; it’s easy to feel a connection to the characters and feel that these are very real parts of a world. The cast is a highlight — better than this type of film can usually muster.

Violence, blood, and cringe inducing scenes of brutality will be hard for the average filmgoer to watch and may leave some feeling queasy, but if you can look past the heavy violence and just let yourself live in this world for ninety minutes, I believe you’ll be glad you did. By the end of the film, you’ll feel like you’ve lived through the same horrific events that our protagonists encountered. On paper that might not sound like a very great experience… but in this circumstance, it is.

2 thoughts on “ MOVIE REVIEW: Green Room ”

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By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

We’re used to Patrick Stewart wrapping his plummy British tones around Shakespeare or the grandiose visionaries he plays in Star Trek and X-Men. In Green Room, he has a badass blast as Darcy, a neo-Nazi nutjob who runs a skinhead-filled roadhouse in Oregon – to hell with any punks who get in his way.

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And do they ever! Green Room revolves around Darcy’s attempt to kill the punk band that has the bad luck to play at his club just as one of Darcy’s white supremacists stabs a girl in the skull. The band, called the Ain’t Rights, includes bassist Pat (a superb Anton Yelchin), singer Tiger (Callum Turner), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat) and drummer Reece (Joe Cole). Also, Amber (a wicked-awesome Imogen Poots), the dead girl’s BFF. The Ain’t Rights talk a lot about live performance and the energy that flows between band and audience. It’s electric. The same applies to this movie. It keeps getting up in your face with tricks you don’t see coming. Green Room is way more than crass exploitation. It’s a B movie with  an art-house core.

The plot, cooked up by directing maestro Jeremy Salnier (his Blue Ruin is some kind of mad classic), can be summed up in four words: The punks must die! Green Room is a high-tension siege thriller spiced with black humor. The Ain’t Rights actually sang the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off!” to these backwoods creeps. Saulnier also has an artful way of pushing your fear buttons with machetes, guns and attack dogs and then making you scream for mercy. It’ll do you no good. Green Room means business, the nastiest kind. You’ve been warned.

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‘Green Room’ Director Jeremy Saulnier’s New Thriller ‘Rebel Ridge’ Heads to Netflix [Trailer]

The director of films including  Blue Ruin  and  Green Room ,  Jeremy Saulnier  is back this year with the thriller  Rebel Ridge , and  Netflix has released the official trailer this morning.

Rebel Ridge  arrives on Netflix  September 6, 2024 .

The film is described as “a high-velocity thriller.”

Aaron Pierre  stars as an ex-Marine who takes on a web of small-town corruption.

In the film, “Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) enters the town of Shelby Springs on a simple but urgent mission– post bail for his cousin and save him from imminent danger. But when Terry’s life’s savings is unjustly seized by law-enforcement, he’s forced to go head to head with local police chief Sandy Burnne ( Don Johnson ) and his combat-ready officers. Terry finds an unlikely ally in court clerk Summer McBride ( AnnaSophia Robb ) and the two become ensnared in a deep-rooted conspiracy within the remote township. As the stakes turn deadly, Terry must call upon his mysterious background to break the department’s hold on the community, bring justice to his own family– and protect Summer in the process.”

Rebel Ridge is described as a “deeply human yet high-velocity thriller that explores corruption and morality in the context of bone-breaking action and ever-coiling suspense.”

Produced by Anish Savjani, Neil Kopp, Vincent Savino and Jeremy Saulnier, Rebel Ridge also stars David Denman, Emory Cohen, Steve Zissis, Zsané Jhé, Dana Lee and James Cromwell.

Writer in the horror community since 2008. Editor in Chief of Bloody Disgusting. Owns Eli Roth's prop corpse from Piranha 3D. Has four awesome cats. Still plays with toys.

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Best Rom-Coms and Romance Movies of 2024

Look, with the recent successes of Anyone But You or even Ticket to Paradise , we’re not saying rom-coms and romance movies are back to full life in theaters, but that their demise has been greatly exaggerated. (Just like our last few dates off the apps.) And besides, in the privacy of our homes? Things are really heating up, with plenty of choices on streaming services, both from abroad and of every outlook.

So when we put together our guide of the 2024’s best rom-coms and romance movies, we’re looking at PDAs for everyone to see in fawning awe (we won’t acknowledge of any other reaction) and what’s happening behind shuttered living room curtains. This includes It Ends With Us (starring Blake Lively, adapting Colleen Hoover ‘s multi-million best-seller), Hit Man (starring and co-written Glen Powell …so he’s got brains to go with the rest of the package?), Challengers (featuring Zendaya in a love triangle and sports shorts), The Fall Guy (with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt in the Barbenheimer reunification we didn’t know we needed), Love Lies Bleeding (the unapologetic thriller with Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian), Fly Me to the Moon ( Scarlett Johannsson and Channing Tatum take a gambit on romance),  The Idea of You (if Anne Hathaway’s happy, we’re happy), and Upgraded (a good old-fashioned rom-com with Camila Mendes).

We’ve ranked the list by Tomatometer, with Certified Fresh movies first. Whether it’s date night or friends outing, or something to cozy up with a partner (even if it is a pint of ice cream), with all the choices, tonight’s the night you’ll find a match.

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The Front Room

It tells the story of a newly pregnant couple who are forced to take in an ailing, estranged stepmother. It tells the story of a newly pregnant couple who are forced to take in an ailing, estranged stepmother. It tells the story of a newly pregnant couple who are forced to take in an ailing, estranged stepmother.

• Brandy Norwood
• Andrew Burnap
• Kathryn Hunter

Top cast 17

• Pastor Lewis

• 2nd Old Woman

• Administrator
• One Year Old Laurie

• Baby Laurie

• College Student

• Interviewer #1
• (uncredited)

• Church Woman
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• When will The Front Room be released? Powered by Alexa
• September 6, 2024 (United States)
• United States
• The front room
• Two & Two Pictures
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 34 minutes

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You go to this L.A. play. When you get there, you find out you have 60 minutes to escape

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A few minutes after the play begins, the actors stop, empty their pockets and repeat their last few lines. And then they do it again. And again. And again. This live approximation of a vinyl record that catches on loop goes on for a few more minutes, the actors getting slightly louder and a tinge more testy as they continue the repetition.

They can’t move, they say, as they are “waiting for Godot.” But they are actually waiting for us, the audience, to get out of our seats, walk onstage and start to piece together a puzzle out of the fragmented pieces of paper they‘ve dropped.

Cards and letters lay on the ground for audience members to discover the next clue.

Melanie Pentecost holds a rock that gives the next context clue to to move the play forward.

This is “Escape From Godot,” an escape room that is also a work of theater — or vice versa. It upends the conventions of both. This is a play in which audience members become participants, the game requiring patrons to hop on the dials and interact with props in order to propel the narrative forward. Puzzles are hidden in the script, ensuring that the players become actors and are in abstract communication with the performers.

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But its greatest trick? Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” the theatrical escape room taps into the themes of the original work, creating an open-for-interpretation piece of playfully interactive art that grapples with existential questions — how we communicate, or fail to, with others, and the balance among selfish behavior, free will and empathy. Like Beckett’s play, there is no Godot who will come, but we are all caught in a world where the mundane, the absurd and our own desire for answers propel us forward.

Our group — I’m playing with seven strangers — hesitates to jump onstage and set the game afoot. It’s a break of decorum, both of theater protocol and personal boundaries. One player nervously scans his ticket, trying to find a missing clue, another flips through a notebook that was placed on her chair and most of us look at each other and whisper questions about what to do. Realizing, after about seven minutes, that there will be no end to “Escape From Godot” if we don’t move, my group begins to hesitatingly work together. In order for the actors to proceed to the next scene, we need to get them a message crafted from the ephemera that they have dropped.

Actor Phil Daddario kicks into the air during his performance.

Daddario wipes sweat from his face while performing.

“I bet you were not the longest group that has sat,” the show’s co-creator, Jeff Crocker, later tells me when I describe those seven minutes of awkwardness. Jeff is one half of Mister & Mischief , an L.A.-based husband-and-wife duo that has crafted experiences for theme parks, zoos, museums and more. (Jeff’s wife, Andy Crocker, recently created a game-like experience for the Los Angeles Public Library system.) “Escape From Godot” is their first escape room.

“Typically, theater-minded folks, the last thing they’re ever going to do is get up onstage in the middle of the scene,” Jeff says. “That’s a hidden puzzle right there. Are you the person who is bold enough to walk onstage in the middle of a performance in order to make this repetition cease? There’s a lot of weird little social bits like that happening.”

“Escape From Godot” premiered at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2018 and has been periodically revived over the years, its latest as part of this months RECON event at the Universal City Hilton, a convention held by escape room aficionado site Room Escape Artist . An initial run of dates through Aug. 25 at Atwater’s Moving Arts Theatre sold out, so “Escape From Godot” has been extended through Sept. 8.

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The idea stemmed from Crocker hearing about an escape room in Europe that had taken place throughout a train, a promotional event tied to a film. Joking about potential properties they could base a project on, the Crockers hit on “Waiting for Godot.”

“Andy has a theater degree, and ‘Waiting for Godot’ is classically known as this play where nothing happens,” Jeff says. “To folks who don’t create theater, you hear that as the B-word, boring. It’s a go-to play where people wait for a person who never shows up. There’s more to it than that, and when you see a not-great production of ‘Waiting for Godot,’ it can feel like you want to escape. I’ve seen really great productions of it, and there’s a reason it’s a classic.”

In “Escape From Godot,” puzzles may be hidden in the bowler hats of the performers. Do we ask them to surrender their apparel or wait in the hopes that they will drop them?

Like Beckett’s play, characters in questionable physical shape will appear on the stage, but any sense of compassion is soon overtaken by the desire to solve the next puzzle via the props they‘re carrying. Boxes and baskets with locks may be dropped onstage, their combinations found in the monologues of the actors — Justin Okin as GiGi and Bill Salyers as DoDo, stand-ins for Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon.

'Escape From Godot'

Where: Moving Arts Theatre, 3191 Casitas Ave., No. 100, Los Angeles

When: Weekends through Sept. 8, with multiple hour-long performances each evening. Sold-out through Aug. 24. Additional tickets on-sale Aug. 16 at 12 p.m.

Cost: $60 per person

Info: misterandmischief.fun

“Escape From Godot” will even nod to other theatrical works. My favorite puzzle turned out to involve a combination lock affixed to a basket, in which uncovering the solution required us to listen to a monologue that alluded to famous cats in history and culture. “Escape From Godot” won’t even start unless guests solve an initial puzzle, one the necessitates we align our tickets with a theater seating chart and find the correct seat. One could opt not to play, as long as others are, and sit and watch, taking in a script that toys with our place and faith in the world, albeit with a reference to the musical “Cats.”

The longer the audience goes without hitting on the right solution, the louder and faster the monologues will become. It creates tension and tests a group to maintain a sense of calm and patience. Nothing gets too hairy; the silliness of the situation dominates the tone.

“We purely set out to fulfill our original delightful idea of having fun from escaping from a notoriously monotonous play, but in doing so, as we started to develop what the puzzles were and the way we wanted the audience to interact, it did start to support the themes of the play while also poking a little fun at it,” Jeff says. “You get the little bits of what Beckett was trying to say about what existence wants to be, what belief in God wants to be, but doing it in a way that is mischievous.”

By the time the show ends, roles have been reversed. Members of the audience have been cast as performers and the actors at times became the audience, trapped with repeating dramatic orations while watching us play. It’s a final message that isn’t too divorced from the Beckett text: We’re all performers, too often waiting for a cue.

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Todd Martens is a features columnist at the Los Angeles Times who writes about theme parks and West Coast Experiences, among other topics. Martens joined the Los Angeles Times in 2007 and has covered a mix of interactive entertainment as its game critic and pop music as a reporter and editor. Previously, he reported on the music business for Billboard Magazine. Martens has contributed to numerous books, including “The Big Lebowski: An Illustrated, Annotated History of the Greatest Cult Film of All Time.” He continues to torture himself by rooting for the Chicago Cubs and, while he likes dogs, he is more of a cat person.

Michael Blackshire is a 2023-24 photography fellow at the Los Angeles Times. He previously interned at the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune and his work has been published in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Huffington Post and New York Magazine. Blackshire is from Kentucky and spent his teenage years in Metro Atlanta. He received his higher education from Western Kentucky University and Ohio University.

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