Critics reviews

I thought this movie would be good, but I did not expect it to be _this_ good. As in, so tense and funny and well acted (chiefly by the late, great Anton Yelchin, leading the proceedings with his smart, soulful eyes and genuine terror turned cynical fuck-it-all), that I even accepted elegant Patrick Stewart would lead a bunch of scumbags skinheads in the PNW woods. The last scene is met with the perfect musical punchlines of the year.

Genre "throwbacks" are at their worst when emptily imitating their predecessors, replete with winks and nods that, if taking a stab at horror, inevitably turn to guts and gougings. Such is the case with Green Room, an idea-free shocker that spends about 15 minutes characterizing the members of a punk band only to quickly turn them into shaking sacks of flesh.

This genre exercise in locked-room horror is masterful and swift, proving Saulnier could direct an episode of The Walking Dead with no problem. His script flirts with coupledom and then rejects it, as a nihilist punk horror movie should.

It's all put together with great skill, but never quite manages to deliver more than its modest, stripped-back story will allow. Even the surprises ring a little hollow, folded into the action to self-consciously spice things up rather than to add any emotional resonance. But perhaps the film is more effective as an anti Nazi screed, mocking their delusions of grandeur and sincere belief that their politics have mass-market potential.

With its silly setup and easy baddies (like Joel Schumacher's Falling Down, Green Room knows that Nazis are the most politically safe villains), it's like a graphic novel. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but Saulnier's lack of range means it's the same five panels repeated, and the unabating murder is numbing and depressing.

Saulnier, canny entertainer that he is, has contrived a scenario in which any kind of subtlety can be sacrificed on the altar of rabble-rousing. This is more of a crowd-pleaser than its predecessor, and while its basic, elemental appeal is undeniable – to say nothing of its formal chops – it's also a tad programmatic. Where Blue Ruin problematised blood-lusting retribution, Green Room enshrines it, and thus goes down pretty easy despite all the high-calibre kill-shots and splintered limbs.

It's stylish and rinsed in a queasy yellow-green but too reliant on genre conventions to stand out... The violence is well choreographed and often shocking, the gore shown for only as long as a person in that situation would look before turning away. But the characters are picked off in predictable order, and a neo-Nazi angle leads to a dead end. Patrick Stewart is miscast as the skinheads' leader, his theatricality clashing with the other actors' realism.

It doesn't stint on the torn-out throats and headshots and a great big belly being opened with a box-cutter—it's "unrelenting" and "visceral" and everything else that you've heard on the heels of "major festival buzz." It certainly isn't worse than most of this year's crop of middle-range genre material—Kevin Costner's Criminal, for example—and it is a great deal more "extreme." None of which prevents it being a total and abject cop-out, artfully composed and utterly comatose.

The movie devolves into a tale of the raw will, strategic calculation, and macabre happenstance of a primal struggle to survive. A viewer may well share the feeling of captivity, whether arising from an interest in the amiable band members' fate or from the narrow limits of the plot. One screenplay riff, on the taking of good advice, is piquantly memorable, but Saulnier's clever methods are insubstantial and the movie's stakes, though mortal, seem slight.

Saulnier's instincts as a director outpace his abilities as a writer... In Blue Ruin, Saulnier displays an unusual sensitivity not only to peripheral vision but also to what could be called ambient vision—the sights that inform a person's consciousness of a scene whether he or she is looking at them or not. Life doesn't spill beyond the frame that way in the overly theatrical Green Room. Anything of substance is left waiting in the wings.

Though cannily engineered as a crowd pleaser — it could be seen as a Die Hard for viewers with stronger stomachs — Green Room has an abiding punk spirit that informs every aspect of the production. It's cut to a tight 93 minutes, made tighter by jagged edits that always come a beat or two before they might be anticipated. Saulnier also counts on the audience to be smart and aware of genre conventions, so he can defy them at every turn.

Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room is an impeccably crafted cinematic torture machine — in the best possible way... Count me among the initially skeptical. The idea sounds less like a grindhouse classic than a juvenile music video, but Saulnier distinguishes the grungy, schlocky concept with artistry and expertise.