This Punk as F—k Thriller Is Streaming on Netflix
The life of a touring punk rock band can be rough. You eat gas station snacks and play shows to tiny crowds. If you’re lucky, you make enough money to survive till the next gig. You never know when your van will break down or your equipment will be stolen or when you’ll be held captive in the middle of the woods by a gang of drug smuggling skinhead nazis lead by Patrick Stewart. At least, that’s what happens in Green Room, the gritty, grisly, and punk-as-fuck thriller from Jeremy Saulnier that is now on Netflix.
The movie opens with the touring punk band The Ain’t Rights waking up in their van in a cornfield having fallen asleep while driving. They manage to siphon enough gas to get them to their next show. When that turns out to be playing in a dingy Mexican restaurant for pocket change—“split four ways it’s six bucks each”—their mohawked host sets them up with a better paying gig as an apology. The only problem? It’s in rural Oregon at a right-wing skinhead club. “They’re not like burning crosses or anything right? We just play rock?” the guitarist, Sam (Alia Shawkat), asks. “Uh… I’d play your earlier stuff. Heavy stuff,” he advises. When they get to the club, they decide the punk thing to do is open with a cover of Dead Kennedys classic “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” to jeers and thrown bottles. But amazingly they survive unscathed. Then, after the show is done, they go to the green room to get their things and stumble upon a murder scene.
What follows is a brutal siege thriller in which each scene is as taut as a guitar string. Band members Sam, Pat (Anton Yelchin), Reece (Joe Cole), and Tiger (Callum Turner) are locked inside the green room with the corpse of a young woman, that woman’s best friend (Imogen Poots), and a gun-toting bouncer while the rest of the skinheads try to figure out what to do. When the head nazi, Darcy (Patrick Stewart in a casting decision that’s almost too brilliant), arrives, he realizes there’s only one way out of this mess. Soon, The Ain’t Rights are battling machetes, shotguns, rabid dogs, and more in a bad gig that quickly turns into a journey through hell.
Green Room isn’t really trying to say much about the nature of white supremacy or the rise of neo-nazism in America. When Saulnier started filming Green Room in 2014, he probably didn’t realize that a few years later neo-nazis would be on the rise and terrorizing cities like Charlottesville while the president defended them. Still, the nazi threat of the movie has some sadly added relevance when watched in 2018.
Director Jeremy Saulnier played in punk bands in the ‘90s, and clearly knows the film’s world. He also keeps the tension ratcheting up each from scene to scene throughout the film’s lean 95 minutes. Most of the movie takes place in the titular green room. The contained space makes for a claustrophobic and engrossing film that’s a welcome change from the mainstream film trend toward world-sprawling action movies with more characters than you can keep track of. It’s a bloody, brutal film that feels like taking a combat boot to the teeth in a mosh pit. But it will remind you that punk’s not dead—at least, not in the movies.
