There was a great deal of fuss surrounding director Jeremy Saulnier’s debut film, the stylish revenge thriller Blue Ruin. Yet aside from a memorably heady atmosphere, I found it rather underwhelming. His attempts to add something new to a tired formula ultimately ran dry.
For his sophomore feature, he’s made a brave move up the rainbow with Green Room, a savage horror film that also takes a familiar subgenre but this time, he elevates it quite superbly.
The premise is a riff on the hillbilly survival nightmare, typified by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, where a group of youths find themselves at the mercy of a pack of backwoods brutalists. In Saulnier’s take, an underground, and overly proud of it, rock band (including Anton Yelchin and Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat) books a gig at a neo-Nazi bar despite their initial reservations.
The performance itself runs smoothly, with just a few bottles thrown and inflammatory names hurled. But as they prepare to leave, they stumble upon a dead body and are forced to barricade themselves in the green room while a line of thugs, led by Patrick Stewart, try to force their way in.
Initially, it seems as if Saulnier is, yet again, disguising a derivative thriller as something else with his assured direction and Instagram-filtered style. But this is one of the rare horror films that actually improves as it goes. The familiar setup is lifted by a lack of punch-pulling (unlike many other contemporary horror films, there really are no rules) and Saulnier’s ability to take a well-trodden road and fill it with grisly surprises is quite something. The Cannes audience were gasping and recoiling at all the right moments.
There’s also a thick vein of dark humour that runs through the film which never turns it into a comedy but keeps some of the nastier moments (and boy, are they nasty) from turning it into torture porn. While Yelchin, Shawkat and their bandmates, as well as a spunky turn from Imogen Poots as a girl trapped with them, are all standouts, the skinheads are often less impressive. Stewart’s accent is shaky at best while he fails to really convince as a grimy bigot.
But the film wisely sticks with the good guys for the most part and escalates to a wonderfully gory finale. Given the rapturous response from the audience here at Cannes, I have a feeling that this one is going to be a late night horror favourite for years to come. I look forward to yellow.
