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| The cool, tunnel-like poster for Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room |
Green Room is the 3rd feature from writer-director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin (2013)), who debuted with the low-budgeted horror-comedy Murder Party (2007).
A passionate but unsuccessful punk band of youths get an offer to finish their ailed tour with a concert that will turn in a wad of cash. Their acceptance is soon regretted when they witness something they shouldn't at the neo-Nazi venue.
Anton Yelchin (Broken Horses (2015)) has grown quite a bit, - from the cute kid of Fierce People (2005)) to the hard-edged, balding guy that meets us in Green Room, in which he acts well yet again. Patrick Stewart (The Game of Their Lives (2005)) is convincing as the inhumane heavy of the pic, though his garbled intonation made me wish I'd had subtitles.
Green Room sets up an interesting premise and turns fast into a survival horror with some effective gross-out moments and awesome effects work. SPOILER The arm chopping scene early on is probably its best.
Real terror didn't creep up on me via the film, simply because the punk band's situation seemed too far removed from any situation I might ever find myself in. What could have been another stupid-youths-caught-in-the-woods-to-die-screaming-one-by-one is lifted here due to the fact that the kids aren't stupid at all, and that the truly rotten predicament seems realistic enough.
SPOILER The film features some neat details like the fire extinguisher turning bad guys into something resembling zombies, and the band, - in true punk kid fashion, - fixing even mutilated limbs with duct tape.
Green Room, while a good ride for fans of the brutal, isn't a perfect film, though. It upholds a solemnity that is a little much, and some of the lines that best represent this don't really stick. It injects a self-ironic touch, but only in the last shot of the film. Some of the characterizations that might have been deepened seem to have been replaced with much talk of cartridges, bullets and guns, which at some point become something less than interesting. SPOILER Also, the Werm character, intensely portrayed by Brent Werzner (Blue Ruin), who plays an eerie, intense function in the first part of the film, and whom we later feel curious about, has nothing more to do in the film.
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Here's a short trailer for the film
Cost: 5 mil. $
Box office: 3 mil. $ and counting
= Too early to say
[Green Room was released May 17 (Cannes) and runs 95 minutes. The film was shot from October 2014 in Oregon. It was shown in the Directors' Fortnight section in Cannes and later shown at the opening night of the Toronto International Film Festival. The film opened wide #16, in 777 theaters, to a 0.4 mil. $ first weekend in North America where it has so far grossed 2.7 mil. $ (90 % of the total gross). It has been shown at a wealth of film festivals, and the gross reported above must rise in time to come. Its 2nd and 3rd biggest markets reported yet are France with 0.2 mil. $ (6.7 %) and United Arab Emirates with 66k $ (2.2 %). Green Room is certified fresh at 90 % with a 7.7 critical average on Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Green Room?
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