Need Another Reason to Hate Racists? Here Ya Go!

Rating: 9/10 (21 May 2016)

Green room - a room where performers "relax" when not performing. Growing up in rock bands through-and-past college, I've spent my fair-share of time in green rooms. In the pretense-filled world of underground music, this is often the one place musicians are their un-costumed selves. That vulnerability mixed with anticipation of the performance creates a tension. Green Room amps that tension to 11, replacing stage-fright with death-fright. A contained thriller so palpably desperate, I felt myself trying to break down the poster-plastered walls on screen. In the film, a road-weary punk-rock foursome reluctantly take a gig at a white-supremacist venue in order to make enough money to get home, but things turn bad when they discover a murder on premises. And while it certainly gives us another reason to hate racists, there's more to it than that. While a clear love for the hardcore punk scene is on display here, Saulnier is issuing a warning about groupthink of all kinds. Whether music, religion, trends, scenes, or any other community, we must never let our longing for belonging hinder our humanity. When things go wrong, they go very wrong, with some hard-to-stomach violence that works both narratively and morally, even as you cringe. Like writer/director Saulnier's great Blue Ruin, it uses human flaws in place of genre clichés to amplify its message. Each time we think a character is going to do the dumb thing characters always do in horror-thrillers, it deftly defies that platitude. So while Green Room is, at times, a supremely difficult film, it's largely an engaging and completely rewarding backwoods blood-fest that made me thankful for only the minor jitters I get backstage.