Anton Yelchin plays a touring punk rocker.
While Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room is a movie so unsettling and brutal that it almost feels cruel to recommend it, one of the most nerve-wracking moments comes before all bloody hell breaks loose. Our protagonists are a Washington, D.C.-based punk quartet called the Ain’t Rights — Pat (Anton Yelchin), Sam (Alia Shawkat), Tiger (Callum Turner) and Reece (Joe Cole) — and they’re playing an impromptu gig at a rural skinhead bar in the Pacific Northwest after their original gig has fallen through. Not content to take their money and get out of Dodge, they decide to poke their hosts — by playing a cover version of Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.”
Green Room has gotten plenty of attention for Saulnier’s chops at manufacturing pure, low-down genre intensity, and that attention is certainly deserved. Yet buried in this crackling siege thriller is a story about kids posing at living on the edge, until they find themselves in a situation where they can see what the edge really looks like.
And it looks pretty awful once the members of the Ain’t Rights make the mistake of walking back into the club’s green room. Much of what follows takes place in that room, as the terrified musicians come to realize that nothing good lies just outside their lockable door.
Green Room probably works best because of the characters Saulnier places in that room. From the opening scene in which we see their van having plowed through a corn field because the driver fell asleep at the wheel, to their guerrilla missions to siphon gas so they can keep their road trip rolling, it’s clear that the Ain’t Rights are living their idea of a punk life. Green Room excels as a horror movie that can jolt an audience out of their seats, but it’s also about the horror of realizing that no matter how hardcore you might try to convince the world you are, there are things — and people — out there that are much harder.
