Originally published May 2019

Horror movies are constantly attempting to tap into some innate human emotions to evoke fear and anxiety in their audiences. It's common for a horror movie to double down and use a specific subject matter to feed off that personal experience of the niche viewer, to mixed success. Velvet Buzzsaw is a comical mess that tried to tap into the high-class art world. Get Out is a metaphor to represent the bizarre experience of a black person from the city feeling out of place in the white suburbs. IT is a movie about clowns that eat children. None of these films really tapped into any personal experience of mine. Green Room, however, is a violent, intense, dramatic movie that has been on my mind every time my band suggested we go on tour since the film first came out.

While there have been plenty of movies over the years that romanticize the life of the struggling rock star, such as Almost Famous, Green Room is very effective in multiple ways at making that lifestyle seem like a nightmare. Green Room would probably make for a good movie for parents to show any teenager wanting to run away to join a punk or metal band, much like how Requiem for a Dream is an effective deterrent to drug use. Nonetheless, even if you don't have any experience of your own being in a traveling band that has gone to some somewhat shady areas, Green Room is still a pretty good movie that should make you a bit anxious as you watch it.

Pros

• Effective at portraying the type of people you would expect in this situation, i.e. the attitudes of punks and Nazis

• Characters are not complete idiots; they make some smart choices but they also make occasional disastrous mistakes that are believable

• Tension is constant as things continue to escalate

• Strong and convincing performances from the whole cast

• Subtlety and action do a lot for the storytelling

Cons

• Sub-plots that are closely tied to the main situation of the movie are a little unclear

• Some of the dialogue towards the end is a little too Hollywood and unnatural to the situation

• Some character motivations are unclear

• I like Patrick Stewart, but he seems a little miscast; he's not quite menacing or intimidating enough as the main antagonist

Plot & Thoughts

The Ain't Rights is a punk band on tour through the Pacific Northwest of the United States. In typical poor-band fashion, the band awakens to the interior of their van and to the fact that they somehow managed to safely crash their vehicle into a cornfield. While this might be extremely upsetting to most normal people at the thought that they all could have died because their driver fell asleep at the wheel, everyone seems quite nonchalant about it, as though it's not the first time. Unfortunately for them, doing so without turning off the engine has drained all the gas from the tank, so in order to get back on the road to get to their next destination, a couple of them ride a bike up the road a few miles to siphon gas out of cars in a parking lot. They manage to make it to their contact, a "punk journalist" named Tad, who lets them stay in his apartment for a night before their show. More bad luck for the band is thrown at them, however, as the show they were going to play was canceled before they knew it and they have to play to an empty iHop instead.

Being a punk band that is not sponsored (and would never sell out because that's not punk!), they have to live off the funds earned from show to show. So the lack of a decent show that didn't pay for their travel efforts rightly pisses them off. Their journalist friend, however, feeling guilty (or vengeful?), gets them a spot on the stage in a venue that is somewhere off the beaten path around Portland, Oregon. The catch is that the venue happens to be a place owned by, operated by, and that serves Neo-Nazis. Having Nazis in the crowd is nothing new to punk and metal bands, however, the Ain't Rights quickly find themselves in over their heads when they witness a murder and become an additional mess that the owners of the club need to "clean up."

After the murder occurs and the events are set in motion, a little over thirty minutes in, Green Room maintains a steady level of tension and anxiety. There is no such thing as downtime. Even when the band isn't necessarily in immediate danger, everyone is quick to note that they are losing time and their chance to escape alive. Even when it seems like the band has found a way out or a resource that might help them escape, things get even more complicated and dire.

As someone who has performed for a group of people I didn't know in the middle of the woods and who has driven a small van down dirt roads close to cornfields in the middle of nowhere late at night, I might be a little biased in favor of Green Room as a film. That being said, I think the movie does a lot of things right that make it worth watching for even the unbiased. For one thing, it portrays all the various types of people who would be involved in punk in just the first 20 minutes. There's the aggressive asshole singer, the somewhat nervous and anti-social guitarist, the foul-mouthed female bassist who manages to keep the band together, the drummer who's just into the music and what it means to be "punk," and the friendly journalist with a mohawk who seems knowledgeable about the music but doesn't quite get what it means to be "punk."

Just during their interview with the young journalist, the dialogue quickly demonstrates the type of personalities of everyone, highlights all the different punk archetypes, and manages to give us some background on the band without being too explicit. The movie even makes good on the fact that the characters are playing as archetypes because later on, the characters answer one of the journalist's questions again amongst themselves differently than they did in the interview to demonstrate that some of it is an act. In fact, there are multiple details throughout the movie that come full circle in some way, which is always satisfying because it demonstrates an understanding of foreshadowing on the part of the filmmakers.

The part where Green Room falters is in how it gets a little muddy in the details surrounding the side characters and subplots. There are some character interactions that make it seem like a scene or two was cut because I couldn't help feeling like some characters knew each other better than they should have in certain moments. There are also minor story arcs that intersect with the main events of the movie but are either not explained in a way that is very impactful, or are introduced too late in the plot to really matter in the grand scheme of things. I like that Green Room doesn't spell a lot of things out and lets most of the action and dialogue explain things in subtle ways, but then it calls special attention to a song called "Fleischwolf," or a hidden heroine den, or why someone shouldn't have been "working the door," and these details don't really help illuminate anything about the situation at hand.

Had some of these sub-plots and details been introduced or resolved earlier, they might not have felt so irrelevant. Imagine being in the shoes of the Aint Rights, desperately trying to come up with an escape plan and someone tries to tell you a love story about a Nazi and his girlfriend trying to get out of the scene. Do you really care about that story now that you're trying to get out, whether or not it really is the reason why you're trapped in the first place? Had we been able to see more about how this love story was going to inevitably screw everything up, it might have felt more important. Instead, it feels like a useless detail.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

If you enjoy the sensation of tension and anxiety in your movies, Green Room is a good watch. It makes its characters realistically intelligent and foolish at the same time. It uses storytelling techniques effectively to make the smaller details of the first act matter more later. It also is not too far-fetched of a scenario that very likely could or has happened at some point or another. It just misses the mark on some of the sub-plots. Nonetheless, Green Room is an easily recommended horror movie.

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