Down and dirty indie thriller has visceral thrills but lacks heart

Rating: 6/10 (22 October 2017)

'Green Room' matches the intensity and grimness of writer/director Jeremy Saulnier's breakout effort 'Blue Ruin', but lacks the soul that made that film so haunting and tragically poetic.
It stars the late Anton Yelchin in another low key, naturalistic performance alongside a cast of young character actors who really sell the authenticity of this world. It's grimy and dirty and frightening, and that's even before the violent mayhem starts. The atmosphere is dripping with bad vibes and simmering with an undercurrent of violence, and this feeling is mostly thanks to a convincing cast and some tautly engineered direction. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the cast is Patrick Stewart as the neo-nazi establishment owner who coldly calculates the demise of our main characters. Once you get past the fact that it is Sir Patrick (The Sci-fi Nerd King) breaking some bad, he really is quite chilling to watch.
The film has several disturbingly violent sequences that escalate with each new confrontation until a fairly scattershot climax and it mostly makes for a tense watch. However, because the characters aren't explored in any significant way it supplies us with only superficial thrills via the visceral nature of the violence depicted and the fact that we naturally prefer that the underwritten heavy metal rockers win out over the underwritten nutball Nazis who are trying to slay them. It's ultimately just a dirty indie remake of John Carpenter's 'Assault on Precinct 13', but it does a good job of living up to its heritage.