Green Room (2015) | Plot, Cast & Horror Facts

Green Room is a 2015 horror thriller by Jeremy Saulnier about a punk band trapped at a neo-Nazi club after witnessing a murder.

At a Glance

Overview

The Ain’t Rights are a broke hardcore punk band touring the Pacific Northwest in a van, siphoning gas to get to the next show. When a gig falls through, a local radio host sets them up with a paying slot at a remote bar in the woods outside Portland. The crowd turns out to be neo-Nazi skinheads. The band plays anyway, opening with a provocative Dead Kennedys cover, and gets paid. Then bassist Pat walks back into the green room to fetch a phone and finds a young woman stabbed to death, with members of the headlining band standing over her.

From there Green Room becomes a siege. The band and Amber, the dead woman’s friend, are locked in the green room with a skinhead bouncer as hostage, while the bar’s owner, Darcy, calmly plans how to make the witnesses disappear. Saulnier stages the film like John Carpenter‘s Assault on Precinct 13, a small group pinned down by a larger force, with the grubby rural menace of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The violence is sudden, clumsy and shocking, because nobody in the room is a trained fighter. Box cutters, a shotgun and attack dogs do terrible damage in a few seconds.

Production

Saulnier followed his breakout revenge film Blue Ruin with Green Room, drawing on his own youth in the Washington, D.C. hardcore punk scene. Broad Green Pictures financed it, and it was produced by Neil Kopp, Victor Moyers and Anish Savjani. Principal photography took place in October 2014 in and around Portland, Oregon. Saulnier’s regular collaborator Macon Blair, the star of Blue Ruin, plays Gabe, Darcy’s anxious lieutenant. Patrick Stewart took the unusual role of Darcy, playing him as a soft-spoken manager rather than a ranting villain. The film premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in May 2015 and finished third in the Midnight Madness audience vote at the Toronto International Film Festival, before A24 released it in the US in spring 2016.

Cast

• Anton Yelchin as Pat
• Imogen Poots as Amber
• Alia Shawkat as Sam
• Joe Cole as Reece
• Callum Turner as Tiger
• Patrick Stewart as Darcy Banker
• Macon Blair as Gabe

Reception

Green Room earned some of the strongest reviews of any 2016 genre release. Rotten Tomatoes lists 90 percent approval from 250 reviews, with a consensus praising its unapologetic genre thrills and uncommon intelligence, and Metacritic gives it 79 out of 100. Richard Roeper called it a wonderfully nasty, gruesome, jagged-edge gem, and Slate compared its survivalism to Assault on Precinct 13. It appeared on many year-end lists and was nominated for Best Horror at the 2017 Empire Awards. Commercially it was modest, grossing about $3.8 million worldwide against a budget of about $5 million, though its reputation has grown steadily since. It was the last of Anton Yelchin’s films released during his lifetime; he died in June 2016, weeks after its wide release.

Spoiler: The Ending

The band is picked off one by one in failed escape attempts until only Pat and Amber are left. They find what Darcy has really been protecting: a heroin operation run out of the property, which explains why he cannot let any witness leave. Armed with what they can scavenge, the two survivors slip out into the woods and turn the hunt around, ambushing the skinheads and their attack dogs in the dark. The final confrontation with Darcy happens at the edge of the property, and he is killed. As police arrive, Pat and Amber sit exhausted beside the road. Amber asks the desert-island band question the musicians had joked about earlier, and Pat begins to answer before the film cuts to black, a dry, human ending to a brutal night.

Trivia & Facts

• Saulnier drew on his own years in the D.C. hardcore scene for the band and its tour.
• The band provokes the skinhead crowd by opening with a cover of a famous Dead Kennedys anti-Nazi song.
• Macon Blair, star of Saulnier’s Blue Ruin, plays Gabe.
• It placed third in the Midnight Madness People’s Choice vote at TIFF 2015.
• It was the last Anton Yelchin film released before his death in June 2016.
• The “desert-island band” question becomes a running joke that pays off in the final scene.