There is already a lot of construction happening around Green Room. It reflects today’s political climate. It’s a “ horror movie for Trump’s America.” They’re not wrong—there’s a lot to Green Room. But as a moviegoing experience it’s one room, one predicament and the violence that ensues. Green Room is pared down, stripped to gears and blowing itself apart in front of you with all the precision of Patrick Stewart’s throaty elocution.
The Ain’t Rights are a touring hardcore band without a social media presence. They take gigs by word of mouth, siphoning gas across the Pacific Northwest, until they wind up playing a show in a white supremacist compound deep in the woods.
When Pat (Anton Yelchin), Sam (Alia Shawkat), Reece (Joe Cole) and Tiger (Callum Turner) witness a murder in the green room after their set, they know their lives are on the line. What looked like a chaotic assemblage of thugs, skinheads and nazis reveals itself to be a regimented organization swinging into damage control. The Ain’t Rights can’t be allowed to leave the compound alive.
When Darcy Banker (Patrick Stewart), the neo-Nazi leader with a fatherly cult charisma, arrives the situation seems hopelessly stacked against them. The siege is as well-orchestrated as a military operation, in chilling contrast to the desperate band members, improvising the terms of their own survival from behind a locked door.
As the skinheads systematically erase all evidence, unleash dogs and bring out the red-laced elite soldiers, the punks in the band are concocting their own ragged and desperate schemes. Green Room is action-packed, with violence that will grit your teeth, but its real strength is a precision of vision that puts most thrillers to shame.
