Green Room has inspired me to never become a punk rock artist. What starts out as a ho-hum punk show turns into a gruesome survival thriller. And you feel ickier because Patrick Stewart is the bad guy. I cringe just thinking about it.
Pat (Anton Yelchin), Sam (Alia Shawkat), Reece (Joe Cole), and Tiger (Callum Turner) are members of punk band The Ain’t Rights. They live in a van touring through the Pacific Northwest, siphoning gas and playing poorly attended shows. At the end of their tour, the group plays in rural Oregon in front of ultra right/left wing skinheads. After the show, Pat inadvertently sees the after effects of a murder. As a result, the group is forced back into the green room with Amber (Imogen Poots), the dead girl’s friend. Realizing the group can’t escape alive, Darcy (Patrick Stewart) arranges a scenario where they frame the group for the murder while executing the band at the same time.
The Green Room is predominantly a visual experience. The colors clash visibly at the start, with the sunny days and the grungy punk look. Gradually, as we enter the rural club, the colors become gray and murky, with little bits of red clashing with the brighter colors of the band. It paints a nice picture that this band can be terse, but it has limits to its depravity. A warning to people who hate blood: when stuff starts going down in Green Room, the movie torture porns us to death. I’ve never witness such disturbing deaths: box cutters, dogs, and shotgun blasts force us all to witness the sheer brutality of what killing someone looks like. Hopefully, the excessive violence of Green Room disturbs people to the point of introspection on the role of violence in society.
Green Room comes in under 90 minutes long. As such, everything is streamlined. The Ain’t Rights have the most screen time, and only two of them, Pat and Reece, develop any sort of character. Darcy and his assistant Gabe (Macon Blair) are interesting, but everyone else just comes across as “bad guy.” As such, when it comes to survival of any one character, I felt minimally for the few developed characters but mostly nothing for everyone else. The dogs illicit more emotions than the people, which is pretty damning to a movie with such violent imagery it wants to earn.
Green Room is not for the faint of heart. It is a messy, disgusting look at the outliers of society. If I never have to see another person look like a blood fountain, my life would be better off. I’m going to lie in the fetal position for a while now…