A punk band inadvertently stumbles into the scene of a horrific, violent crime. Trapped in a secluded venue, preyed upon by hostile forces, the group must survive and escape as the night draws in around them.
Director Jeremy Sauliner follows up on his brilliant Blue Ruin with an equally subversive and relentlessly harsh thriller that sits outside the parameters of the typical Hollywood mould. Here, characters act and react with an almost “real world” handling of the horrific scenarios that they face. Their fear never subsides, the sense of dread and hopelessness prevails throughout, and their actions often falter to fatal consequence. This isn’t a group of ‘wet behind the ears’ kids who get sassy, quip heavy and kick-ass over the course of ninety minutes. These are terrified young adults, in way over their heads, flailing wildly in order to survive.
More so than any other feature I’ve caught this year, Green Room is an experiential motion picture. This is definitely not a movie for those who go to the pictures solely for entertainment. This is NOT a Blumhouse ‘ghost train’ ride with all of the mollycoddling a, “quiet, quiet, BANG” horror film gets you for the price of admission.
The tension here is real. The harshness never dissipates and the overall tone falls somewhere between Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek, Steven Shell’s Mum & Dad and George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. The aggressor’s pursuit of the protagonist’s deaths isn’t at all personal; it’s just a matter of course. And that cold, remorseless detachment places a dark shroud over any possible levity, crushed by the seriousness of the situation and the relentless attacks the besieged band struggles to survive.
Visually, Green Room is superbly shot and makes deft use of the grubby venue setting and the serene woodlands of Oregon that surround it. That sense of foreboding and isolation compounds the nerve shredding tautness in every scene. Unlike standard horrors the graphic violence peppered throughout doesn’t work to release the build up of pressure but instead punctuates each wound and kill with terrifying causality. The visceral experience never feels gratuitous. This isn’t gore porn in the vein of Saw or Hostel. This is a bleak, unnerving thriller, utterly horrific in its verisimilitude and definitely worth watching if you can stomach not only gruesome gore, but also fraught anxiety too.
Captivating, Monstrous and Superb.
Green Room is released on Friday 13th May in selected theatres
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