Green Room

Green Room is a 2016 independent thriller by director Jeremy Saulnier set in the rural area and deep woods of Oregon. The punk rock band Ain't Rights are touring taking every gig they can because they are notoriously broke even resorting to siphoning gas out of parked cars along the way. When one of their pre-scheduled gigs gets canceled they have to take the offer to play at a Neonazi/White Supremacist bar the next evening. You can probably already kind of imagine what follows. Just one little hint that might surprise you: they don't start to get in trouble for their differing political views, quite the opposite.

The movie features two seemingly opposing subcultures. On the one side the rather anarchic punk band playing a cover of the Dead Kennedys song Nazi Punks, Fuck Off! as an opener to their gig in a crowded Nazi bar. And on the other side obviously the Neonazi group in charge of the bar plus those visiting it. But what I found really amazing is that tensions don't arise because of the obvious ideologic differences, even if that matter might more or less boil right under the surface. No, the real life-threating tension arises from a crime of passion, betrayal and madness. Something that can be inherit to every single political, spiritual or whatever group you could think of. Because it's part of human nature.

The conflict begins when one band member accidentally walks in on a murder scene in the backstage "green room" after they played their set. Following this the movie depicts a chain of further and further escalation, driven by the ruthlessness and cunning of the owner of the bar and the will to survive of those trapped within it.

Before I go deeper into the plot and characters let me first commend the accurate depiction of both main subcultures. The production design is excellent. The setting of the Nazi bar is designed flawlessly. It feels like a real location, the walls covered in white supremacist graffiti, the floors and furniture accurately battered from years of punk concerts and mosh pits and you can almost smell the smoke filled air with that distinct background note of various bodily fluids that is so common around these places. And then there are the costumes. The Ain't Rights clad fittingly in old, worn out and partly destroyed clothes showing the typical no care attitude inherent to most of the punk rock scene. And on the other hand the Neonazis wearing polo shirts, jump boots, bomber jackets, suspenders and donning the familiar skinhead haircut. All of this makes the situation feel real and suspenseful from the moment on when the band arrives. Production Designer Ryan Warren Smith and Costume Designer Amanda Needham very clearly did their research and they did it good.

This excellent production design is the groundworks of the portrayal of two opposing ideologies. When the band gets the offer to play at a right-wing underground club they don't hesitate for long as they need the money but they also don't show any signs of protest or unwillingness to play in front of a whole bunch of Nazis. There is a short bit of hostility when the band arrives shown by one of the bar's patrons towards the band but quickly they are treated like any other performer by the calm and respect-showing stage manager Gabe (Macon Blair). After that when the band gets ready in the backstage green room the guitarist Pat (Anton Yelchin) has the idea to play Nazi Punks, Fuck Off! as their first song as a pure provocation. When it's time to play he starts do doubt that that's really a good idea but the band pulls it through nevertheless. Not surprisingly the crowd isn't pleased but even then it stays kind of civil. A bunch of beer bottles get thrown on stage but other than that nothing really happens. With the next song this whole thing seems to be forgotten as the crowd starts dancing and moshing.

I mention all of this because I'm surprised. I'm not a part of either of these subcultures, so I don't have any experience with possible situations like this. Sure, I am a big metalhead and I also have been at punk shows and similar venues like the bar in the movie. But I have no idea really what that punk lifestyle is like. From my outsider perspective I always thought surely anarchic punks and Nazi skinheads could never be in a room together without a fight breaking out. Now after watching Green Room and looking somewhat deeper into the characteristics of each subculture I see what both scenes have in common. That new scenes constantly develop from each other and that the depicted Neonazi skinhead subculture actually developed out of the original punk and ska movement. I wouldn't have thought that a somewhat simple thriller would bring me onto this track of curiosity and learning about the history and different characteristics of this diverse underground culture.

Now that's enough rambling about my curiosity and surprise. Let's get into the actual movie. From here on out it's absolute SPOILER territory, so you have been warned. So the Ain't Rights play their gig, they want to leave but by pure coincidence Pat goes back into the green room to get a phone his band member Sam (Alia Shawkat) forgot there. And then there lies a dead girl (Taylor Tunes) with a knife stuck in her head. Boom! Conflict! Drama! The rest of the plot begins. From now on the ideologic differences between the groups are completely irrelevant. For the band the only important thing is to get out of that situation alive. For the club owner and his goons the only important thing is to get rid of these unwanted witnesses and make it look like an accident.

And that is were Patrick Stewart comes into play. He portrays the club owner Darcy, a cold and cunning psychopath willing to do anything to divert damage from the club and the "cause". The girl was murdered by the band leader Werm of a right-wing group that was supposed to play after the Aint't Rights who was also the boyfriend of said girl. Later in the movie it turns out that girl wanted to leave him for Daniel (Mark Webber), one of Darcys henchmen, in order to get away from the skinhead scene. So she and her friend Amber (Imogen Poots) chose to confront Werm with that and it went horribly wrong. So here we are again, the conflict arises from the common human element of jealousy and the feel of betrayal, not from the polar political views of the different groups.

What follows now is a claustrophobic nightmare for the band. At first they are able to get the upper hand after their phones were taken from them and they were locked into the green room with an armed guard. They manage to disarm the guard and are now in possession of a hostage. Still believing in the possibility of a peaceful outcome they let them themselves be pursuaded by Darcy to hand over the gun in exchange for calling the police. But when Pat surrenders the gun through the half opened door of the room his arm gets hacked to pieces by a bunch of Nazi goons. So yeah, this movie is pretty violent, but that absolutely fits its style. It wouldn't feel right for such a gritty setting to have "family-friendly" blurred out violence. It's shocking and it gets the message across, these people aren't playing around.

Over the course of the rest of the movie every band member except Pat will die a horrifying death. Tiger (Callum Turner) gets mauled to death by a fight dog. Reece (Joe Cole), first depicted as a capable fighter, simply gets stabbed a bunch of times when he tried to get out of a window. And Sam gets killed by dog, too, when the remaining three of them try to break through the front entrance. Meanwhile also a bunch of Nazi henchmen get killed over time, one of them is Daniel, who tries to help the trapped band after he learns the truth about who killed his girlfriend.

So in the end there's only Pat and Amber. They manage to kill the last two Nazi goons send to kill them to "clean up the scene" and take their firearms while Darcy starts to manipulate the crime scene to make it seem like the band was killed while trespassing private property and stealing fuel from vehicles. That's also the reason why they weren't just all shot right from the start. It had to look like they were mauled by the guard dogs of the property. Pat and Amber find Macie, the more reluctant and morally conflicted stage manager who introduced the band in the beginning. He just gives up immediately, he doesn't want to have anything to do with his group anymore and doesn't want to go to jail. Later on they let him go to get the police while the two of them go to check out where Darcy and the rest of his goons went. They find the staged crime scene, take the remaining two or three henchmen hostage and go confront Darcy. They see what happened to the others and how Darcy wanted to weasel himself out of that situation. A short firefight erupts that leaves all the henchmen as well as Darcy dead and Pat and Amber waiting for the police to show up.

So after that unnecessary retelling of the plot, I just want to say how much I enjoyed this movie. The first time watching was confusing because I didn't get all the details why the Nazis only send in their dogs and didn't go in themselves. The staging of the crime scene in the end finally made sense of it but it was at times confusing for me. For some reason I also didn't quite get the relationship drama that started the whole conflict at first.

When I watched the movie for a second time it was more clear to me and I started to see how the plan of the staged crime scene slowly formed in the head of Darcy. It was a really cool back and forth between the band having a hostage, the police having been already called but diverted by Darcy and Macie and then the realization that noone will probably get out alive of this situation. Patrick Stewart played a stone-cold, ruthless and cunning leader, capable of manipulating the band to surrender their gun at one point sounding reasonable and calm while already plotting to kill them all. He seizes every opportunity he sees and he is more than willing to sacrifice some of his own men to protect the "cause". In the whole movie there's no scene where he shows that his emotions might get the best of him, he's cool headed and calculating until the very end when he gets killed by the two unlikely survivors.

Speaking of the survivors. Anton Yelchin and Imogen Poots did a great job portraying their characters. Pat is scared and nervous in the beginning of the conflict. He is the one negotiating with Darcy to surrender the gun. After he gets his arm cut up, he slowly changes. He tries to convey to his band mates that sometimes unexpected behavior like an all-out attack in a desperate situation is the key to winning, rather than trying to hide or escape. The performance of Anton Yelchin reflects this change of thinking, as he almost deliriously tries to tell the story of a buddy of his who wiped out an entire team of Marines at a Paintball Match by just unexpectedly attacking in the open instead of tactically seeking cover, after he got his arm cut up. The others discard the story and interrupt him before he can finish it because they are too scared. So they do exactly what their captors exspect them to do and therefore die trying to escape.

Only Amber seems to understand what Pat meant to say in the end. From the beginning on she is always distanced from the group as she doesn't belong to the band and her friend just got killed in front of her. Plus there's also the ideological difference between her and the punk band that's already shown in her style of clothing and hair cut. She doesn't connect to the others but she has to work together in order to survive. And that she does racking up quite a kill count. Whereas Pat still seems to feel uneasy to kill in the end, Amber doesn't have the slightest qualms. Imogen Poots did a great job portraying the descent of her character into survival and revenge mode. She plays very convincingly the shocked and emotionally numbed girl that just saw her friend get killed. That very clearly wasn't the first tragedy in her live as she quickly turns around to a more sarcastic but also pragmatic stance later on until she finally tips over the threshold with her first kill. The portrayal of her slowly mounting madness is excellent. You can clearly see towards the end that she won't leave until Darcy is dead.

So to finally get to an end with this long ass post, let me just say I loved the acting, the production design (including the setting) and the expectation subversion as to what might cause the central conflict. Would it just have been Nazis vs. Punks because of ideological reasons the plot wouldn't have made much sense in the first place plus I would have found that rather dull. Subverting that expectation by building in  a crime of passion, not of ideology, and making the protagonist group simply witnesses that have to be disappeared the movie just works without any political commentary. You could transfer the same plot line into a multitude of settings with a clear and defined antagonistic group. Let's say a mafia thriller or a hillbilly backwoods horror movie. That the makers chose this setting just because it's an interesting look into the punk subculture and not to make a dull and anyways universally accepted political commentary is very refreshing.

I've finally made it, this post was taking waaaay too long for a movie I thoroughly enjoyed on the one hand but am also not that passionate about on the other hand. It took so long to write this that I had already forgotten certain details of the movie I originally wanted to include, like Ambers kill count. I think it's about four. Also I completely skipped the drug lab part and that Darcy gets rid of Werm by supplying him dirty heroin. There were some thoughts about this floating through my head, but I really finally want to end this damn thing. I hope it's not too all over the place if anyone stumbles upon this mess. I'll take a break for christmas now, not trying to carve something out of my brain windings. For next year I'll try to stick to movies I really love and hold dear to my heart. That may be much easier to write about. Green Room is a great movie, don't get me wrong, but I was struggling to phrase what exactly I liked so much about it as it wasn't just the tight tension building or gore, but a bit more abstract. With other movies of my top list that hopefully will be a lot easier. Knowing the movie in question completely from memory is kind of an advantage, too.

So, I hope you had more fun with this text than me. Have a nice holiday break and slide well into the new year. Let's see when my next post will come out. Thankfully I don't have that much regular readers, so I can take my time :P