As he demonstrated with his breakout second feature “Blue Ruin,” filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier has an eye for the arresting visual, using it as a counterpoint and tonic to his predilection for equally startling violence.
“Green Room,” a horror film follow-up to the more thriller-ish “Ruin,” opens on a car that has run off the road. From above, we see that it has bulldozed into a cornfield, where it has come to a stop, leaving a wide, flattened path. Slowly, the driver and his three groggy passengers emerge from the slumber that led to the mishap, only to find that, as they slept, their ride has run out of gas - just as they have, of money.
Starring: Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat, Patrick Stewart.
Rating: R for strong brutal graphic violence, gory images, language and some drug content.
On a small bicycle stashed in the back, two of them (Anton Yelchin and Alia Shawkat) pedal to a nearby bowling alley parking lot, where they siphon a couple of gallons out of someone else’s fuel tank.
It’s details like these that lend both texture and authenticity to the new film, which centers on a scrappily resourceful punk band at the tail end of a grueling concert tour. Very soon that resourcefulness will be called into desperate, bloody use as the quartet find themselves — after a performance in front of neo-Nazi skinheads in a remote Oregon club — witnesses to the aftermath of a murder. For the next hour or so, they must struggle to defend themselves and to escape from the violent brotherhood trying to cover up the crime, under the ruthlessly efficient direction of its leader, played by a nastily coldblooded Patrick Stewart.
And here’s where the film runs into problems.
Although Mr. Saulnier has certainly chosen a fresh take on a stale subsection of genre filmmaking, he gets bogged down in the very same cliches and pitfalls that have kept the genre from moving forward. It may be punks vs. skinheads here — instead of a nice suburban family vs. home-invading psychopaths, or horny teenagers vs. (fill in the blank) — but the wheels of this familiar narrative and the well-worn ruts in which they run are all well-traveled. Mr. Saulnier’s artistry is undeniable, but it’s in service of a story that takes us nowhere new.
“Green Room” can be fun to watch, if your tastes run to slasher films. With its mix of guns, blades and dogs to instigate the bloodshed (and duct tape, fire extinguishers and piercing speaker feedback to fight back), the movie manifests a modicum of creativity and dark humor. But once the fighting starts in earnest, the killing occurs with a clockwork pace that feels hasty, particularly because we have had so little time to get to know or care about the protagonists.
In short, there is a human element that is lacking from the film, giving it the rote, mechanistic feel of an exercise without consequence. We’ve come to expect movie villains to be impersonal, almost interchangeable. But not heroes. After a point, the band members turn into generic victims, as in so many horror films.
The performances are pretty good, including turns by Joe Cole and Callum Turner as the other two band members, and Imogen Poots as a weirdly zoned-out friend of the murder victim. But it’s hard to feel much connection with people we know nothing about other than the names of their desert-island bands (the result of an interview question posed by the mohawked punk journalist who sets them up with the fateful gig). Mr. Saulnier wrings a bit of wry humor out of this: The musicians revise their poser-ish hardcore selections to more honest pop favorites, once their lives are in jeopardy.
Aficionados of gore and guts may not mind the comfortably lived-in feel of this blood-spattered “Green Room.” But anyone looking for the ferocious originality, and unexpected humanity, of “Blue Ruin” will be disappointed by Mr. Saulnier’s uninspired cover version of a song we all know.
First Published: April 28, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
