TIFF 2015: Patrick Stewart's Giddy, Gory 'Green Room' Is a Nazi Must-See
Patrick Stewart and pals in ‘Green Room’ (Photo: TIFF)
There are two ways to kick off your first day at a gathering as large and luminous as the Toronto Film Festival: Pace yourself slowly, in order to give your body and brain enough time to adjust to a full day’s worth of film-going; or get up at the crack of dawn, load up on coffee, and jump right in as fast and furiously as you can, with the hope that your early-morning movie has enough jolts to keep you awake.
As it turns out, those in attendance at Friday morning’s press-and-industry screening of Jeremy Saulnier’s deliciously nasty new Green Room didn’t need any spare caffeine to stay alert: The claustrophobic (and gloriously gory) tale — about a boxed-in hardcore-punk band trying to escape the clutches of a vicious white-supremacy gang — has enough gnarly twists and turns to keep you amped for hours afterward. It’s probably the first movie to involve neo-Nazism that will leave you with a big, stupid, satisfied grin on your face.
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Saulnier’s previous film was last year’s Blue Ruin, a man-on-the-run revenge tale that swiftly, seamlessly moved from one location to the next. But Green Room takes place largely in one confined space: A dumpy backwoods clubhouse and music venue where the walls are covered with graffiti and band stickers, and where a “White Pride Worldwide” banner hangs near the stage. That’s where the members of a van-dwelling, D.I.Y.-principled East Coast punk quartet called the Ain’t Rights find themselves after getting stranded on the road mid-tour, and in desperate need of cash.
The band members themselves — which include Like Crazy’s Anton Yelchin and Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat — aren’t sympathetic to the skinheads’ cause; in fact, they cheekily open their show with a cover of the Dead Kennedys’ 1981 classic “Nazi Punks F–k Off,” causing the crowd to turn on them. But just as they’re about to make it safely back to their van, the Ain’t Rights stumble upon a dead body in the venue’s greenroom — and soon find themselves trapped in a window-free room, surrounded by skinheads on all sides, including Patrick Stewart, who plays the goons’ white-power patriarch with a creepily pragmatic sense of menace.
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To say much more about the violent cat-and-mouse game that follows would ruin some of Green Room’s most ingenious surprises, all of which are relayed with the sort of economical, fussy-free attitude championed by the ‘80s hardcore bands whose stickers adorn the group’s van. But for all its efficient leanness, Green Room has an attention to the details of both skinhead culture and D.I.Y. determinism that make its harrowing turn of events feel all the more painfully real. It’s a grimy snapshot of two very different youth cultures, as well as a dread-inducing look at how, with enough pressure, those respective group’s deeply encoded moralities can quickly come undone. Imagine Panic Room, had it been directed by Penelope Spheeris.
At a festival like Toronto, where A-list stars and Oscar-bound biopics tend to get the biggest headlines, Green Room — which will be released next spring — might seem like a relatively minor threat. But it’s hard to imagine a movie during the next few days delivering quite as many deliciously boot-covered kicks as this one does.
