4 out of 5

Directed by: Jeremy Saulnier

Green Room is the caliber of flick that reminds me why movies were my first love.

Don’t get me wrong – the cinema-tizing of TV and abandonment of the excessive 22-episode season model has been producing some amazing television, not to me too all the fantastic shows that have paved the path to that over years, and double not to mention the popcorn shows that have kept a baseline of consistency and entertainment running since forever.  …But that last point highlights the rub: While there’s a lot of crossover now with cinematic universes and tight, creator-helmed shows, TV is still, generally TV: Get me to the next episode; get me to the next design.  Built into its core is distraction; a weekly reason to tune out and tune in for an hour.

The kind of boiled down, conclusive punch (and kick, and stab) that Green Room delivers is the cinematic experience.  While television knows cliffhangers and thrills, it can also be part of the success of a well run show to balance that over episodes, mete ing expectations for viewers, but a movie can ‘afford’ to do more, or less, as it deems fit.  The ‘rivet’ factor – what keeps you glued to the screen, transfixed – has, in a way, a lot more room to be tweaked for effectiveness when presenting a singular, 90 or whatever minute story.  And when you’ve been stuck on TV for a while, perhaps only floating to films for “events” like Marvel movies, it is, unfortunately, easy to forget that particular potential that is unique to film.

Green Room is a thriller.  You can trawl through its application of punk ethos, or the curiosity of its final expressions of loyalty and flippancy, to try to determine something, but I don’t think its necessary to, or important to the film in any way. It’s a thriller, and it fucking thrills.

The shorthand context is, admittedly, the one aspect that keeps me from going five stars with this: There’s character – our featured shambling punk band The Ain’t Rights come to possess personalities rather brilliantly indirectly – and I think the film captures a believable balance of What Would I Do with adrenaline fueled risky abandon – but the film definitely jumps to easy bad guys by casting neo Nazis (the hardcore skinhead punker variant) as the villains.  This is a scary fucking group, undeniably, but the way they’re mindlessly led by old racist Darcy (Patrick Stewart) – while, again, you could compare / contrast the punk mindset to this, I don’t think the film’s making a stink of it – and so effectively terrorize our leads starts to border on forced tension amping.  Further reminding us that they’re all around bad dudes by dropping some racist stuff in there – including a particularly silly moment with Stewart – only further draws attention to this.  So what’s Green Room’s method for countering its one-dimensional baddie?

Firstly, it helps that they start out as recognizably terrifying.  The casting is phenomenal, the punk upstarts fully acceptable as varied miscreants versus the steely-eyed glare of crazy Nazis.  Most of us know that feeling of being shoulder-to-shoulder with the big scary dude with scary tattoos, and Green Room nails that dread.  Secondly, the film has zero sympathy.  There are no rules.  The Aint Rights play a show at a white supremacists’ funded joint, then are trying to book it when they, unfortunately, see something they shouldn’t have, and are seen seeing that thing.  Director Saulnier locks them up in the titular room for 30 minutes or so, bartering with their Nazi jailors through the door to let them go.  Its pretty compelling stuff, but still we wonder: Where to go from here?  And once some decisions are made… Well, Saulnier goes for broke and doesn’t look back.  It’s not the most violent thing you’ve ever seen, but again, the lack of sentimentality in application of that violence is insane; you really have no idea if you’re “safe” at any given moment.  And that kept me glued to the screen, cardboard cutout villains be damned.

Saunier even manages to end things effectively, giving us a showdown that feels apt – sloppy, unheroic, not over- or undersold – and even slips in a couple of cool-down beats that bring back in that sense of character that grounded us amidst the bloody cartoonish insanity.

You’ve had your fill of arty horror with Babadook and It Follows.  Forget that nonsense and go back to brutal basics of esge-of-your-seat thrills with Green Room.