While out on the road, a broke Punk Rock Band plays a show in a dingy club when, after their performance, they witnesses a murder in the venue’s green room.  Shortly after, the band members realize that they must fight for their lives if they don’t want to be killed by a group of skinheads led by the club’s owner, Darcy Banker (Patrick Stewart).

A punk rock band and neo-Nazis in a battle for survival, what’s not to love about that? Green Room is one of those awesomely dark genre films that genre fans like myself eat up and one where word of mouth is really going to help get the film seen, similar to how Adam Wingard’s You’re Next thrived.  It’s a hard R-rated crime thriller with a solid cast that does a great job of balancing its simple story with tension and brutal violence.

From the director/writer of the critically acclaimed thriller Blue Ruin, Jeremy Saulnier shifts gears with this film, offering up a serving of violence at a much rapid pace than the slow burning revenge tale of his preceding film.  While that one was much more dramatic, both films are about revenge and survival with Green Room picking up the pace, intensity, and utilizing those themes for all characters involved rather than just the lead.

What I found interesting was that even though the film’s villains were a bunch of skinheads, it was such a subtle aspect to the film that you really didn’t know how deep that part ran until nearly the end of the film.  They could have simply been a biker gang trying to clean up someone’s mess so that the cops didn’t come snooping around their place and possibly find other criminal wrongdoings.  The lack of focus on the “neo-Nazi” part didn’t occur to me until I started writing this review and it’s something I now really appreciate since it adds an element of realism to the story rather than making the baddies fanatical.

The main characters of the film that were caught in the wrong place were band members Pat (Anton Yelchin), Sam (Alia Shawkat), Reece (Joe Cole), and Tiger (Callum Turner) while Imogen Poots played Amber, a friend of the murder victim and someone who is familiar with the club and gang.  What’s nice is that everybody had a moment to shine and it didn’t feel like the bigger stars robbed some of the lesser names of screen time.  Joe Cole, for example, was the muscle that held everything in place early on in the film while Yelchin’s Sam was rather cowardly until finally forced into a position where he needed to be aggressive or risk dying later on.

Green Room is a movie that you need to see from start to finish without pausing or distractions.  It’s a film that commands your attention, keeping you engaged from start to finish as you wonder who will survive the ruthless onslaught of attacks, if anyone.  Continuing his trend of making solid violent thrillers, Jeremy Saulnier will easily have another hit on his hands once this film hits the big screen.  If you don’t know his name by now, you will when you finish this film because just like Wingard, Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, Saulnier will become a name that becomes synonymous with awesome genre filmmaking.

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