It’s been almost a year since the premiere of Jeremy Saulnier‘s Blue Ruin follow-up Green Room, so consider it a testament to some sort of power that people haven’t stopped talking about the movie as it’s hopped from one festival to the next. After what feels like a long line of marketing — three previews, the most recent of which arrived but a few weeks ago — there’s a new red band preview to give some further sense of the carnage.
We think it might be too much, actually. Although Saulnier might think we’re giving it an endorsement-of-sorts, our review out of Cannes said, “It seems that the writer/director learned from [Blue Ruin] and with his follow-up Green Room, also screening in the Directors’ Fortnight, he’s gone full genre, ditching any ambition at making a more elevated statement. However, in doing so he’s also jettisoned all moderation and while Green Room features a number of ingeniously crafted set pieces, it quickly winds up as an excessive, borderline pornographic revelry in extreme violence.”
See a preview of that pornographic revelry below:
Synopsis:
GREEN ROOM is a brilliantly crafted and wickedly fun horror-thriller starring Patrick Stewart as a diabolical club owner who squares off against an unsuspecting but resilient young punk band. Down on their luck punk rockers The Ain’t Rights are finishing up a long and unsuccessful tour, and are about to call it quits when they get an unexpected booking at an isolated, run-down club deep in the backwoods of Oregon. What seems merely to be a third-rate gig escalates into something much more sinister when they witness an act of violence backstage that they weren’t meant to see. Now trapped backstage, they must face off against the club’s depraved owner, Darcy Banker (Stewart), a man who will do anything to protect the secrets of his nefarious enterprise. But while Darcy and his henchmen think the band will be easy to get rid of, The Ain’t Rights prove themselves much more cunning and capable than anyone expected, turning the tables on their unsuspecting captors and setting the stage for the ultimate life-or-death showdown. Intense, emotional, and ingeniously twisted, Green Room is genre filmmaking at its best and most original. Saulnier continues to build his reputation as one of the most exciting and distinctive directors working today, with a movie that’s completely different from his previous, highly acclaimed Blue Ruin, but which is just as risk-taking and even more full of twists. The entire cast deliver first-rate performances, but Patrick Stewart gives a transformative and brilliantly devious turn as Darcy-elegant yet lethal, droll yet terrifying, Stewart makes the film simply unforgettable.
Green Room will enter a limited release on April 15 and expand on April 29.