Saulnier understands this economy of scale well: just as Blue Ruin generated a palpable sense of alarm at the physical results of violence, so Green Room’s gore cuts deep because it is so specific, so clinical, so personal. I was reminded, too, of my recent conversation with Kill List director Ben Wheatley in which he talked about becoming numb to the “scale of destruction” of modern cinema, and argued that the idea of “being hit by rocks or banging your fingers on things” provoked a far greater audience reaction. One scene in particular (which nods directly to Craven’s The Last House on the Left) drew gasps from the audience – myself included. Saulnier may cite the analogue hues of 80s films such as Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and RoboCop as “texturally” influential (“They’re so brutal and so blunt,” he recently enthused to Sight & Sound magazine), but there’s also a debt to the early works of Wes Craven, a film-maker who believed in the morality of explicitness when it came to depicting on-screen violence. In the desperate hours ahead, the air of carefully constructed tension will be sporadically broken by sudden, random acts of violence, the visceral quality of which is heightened by the almost accidental nature of its eruption. “You’re trapped – that’s not a threat, just a fact,” Darcy tells the terrified musicians, who have barricaded themselves into the titular enclosure, assured that this “won’t end well”. Green Room uses its extremist tropes to unpick the more insidious mainstream rhetoric of the American right Before you can say River’s Edge meets Assault on Precinct 13 (via Deliverance), dressing room doors are locked, unregistered firearms are drawn, red-laced troops are assembled, and the management are on the scene in the shape of Patrick Stewart’s sinisterly silver-tongued Darcy Banker. Here, they antagonise the skinhead crowd with a rousing rendition of the Dead Kennedys’ classic Nazi Punks Fuck Off before retreating to the backstage area where they stumble upon a crime scene. ![]() ![]() ![]() Tempted by a matinee payday playing to the backwater boots and braces crowd in a remote Oregon dive, the band head off to a woodland retreat with creepy overtones of Friday the 13th’s leafy Camp Blood. The set-up finds hardcore Arlington band the Ain’t Rights losing their shirts on an end-of-road tour from which they can’t even afford the petrol home. Now, in this only marginally less stripped-down follow-up, Saulnier takes a box cutter to the conventions of the siege/slasher genre, creating a gruelling, gutsy suspense ride that swaps the marooned vistas of Blue Ruin for the claustrophobic confines of a rural roadhouse in which our punk rocker antiheroes are trapped. I n 2013’s ultra-low-budget eye-opener Blue Ruin, writer-director Jeremy Saulnier wondered what a revenge thriller would look like if most of the movie took place in the sticky aftermath of vengeance.
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