Green Room Jeremy Saulnier (USA 2015)
Green Room Jeremy Saulnier (USA 2015) Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Patrick Steward, Brownie and Grimm
Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 25 Feb 2026: ticket £7
the room is empty
Like the frozen yoghurt and the noodle business, the industrial film thrives on playing out endless variations of the same plot. Green Room is no more than a video game escape movie in which a posh English actress with the gun and box cutter is scripted to win.
Saulnier’s Green Room is a cinematic work out with a theme of teenage entrapment by forces of evil – bogie men. The bogie men in this case are decked out as proto white supremacists, but basically they’re just plain old bogie men in the cupboard. Saulnier’s movie lacks any idiosyncratic or cultish distinction; Green Room lacks the imaginative stylisation and deep black comedic rituals of the cult slaughter movie. It’s a technical work out.
It lacks even the socio-cultural thematics of the movie such Carpenter’s Escape from New York or Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace (2013; USA) The latter film which although violently formulaic and lurching into parody, nevertheless in its expressive characterisation calls up the dark forces worming through the flesh of the United States of America, psychically legitimising the sociopathic corruption in the name of an enraged ‘id’. Cooper’s film crudely but effectively pre-empts the politics of Donald Trump, both as parody and as expression of the infantilised rage that defines contemporary politics. In ‘Out of the Furnace’ Woody Harrelson’s performance as Harlan is the film’s psychopathic core. In the film’s opening sequence, set in a drive-in movie theatre, Harrelson maps out the film’s territory as he defines and demonstrates his visceral understanding of human relations. In comparison, Darcy “Green Room’s’ villain (played by Patrick Steward), is something of a pussy cat.
Darcy is motivated by the banality of money rather than any deeper darker forces that penetrate the souls of deranged Americans. Harrelson and Steward both do the ‘hard eye’ thing: Harrelson does it to chilling effect.
Set against the idea of a situation in which a touring punk band gets slammed up in a venue for seeing something they didn’t ought to have seen, Saulnier as director/writer simply mixes together a lukewarm cocktail of ingredients comprising: some punk attitude/dialogue, some bad-ass backwoodsmen with guns and machetes, couple of adorable bull terriers called Brownie and Grimm, and shakes the resultant liquid over the screen in the hope it will all come together. The result is that ‘Green Room’ is a movie without an idea or even the notion of an idea that goes beyond the escape proposition which fails in its feeble attempt to actualise the setting of the forces of good and evil against each other. It is a structure without an overriding psychic concept that ends up as a mechanised combinational tryst that is not a movie but an imitation video game. .
Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk