You could argue Green Room is more thriller than horror, but bones are broken, throats are torn out, and faces are mauled. The camera rarely cuts away as the imagery shocks and awes. There’s no supernatural element—not that that’s a requisite for horror—but the skinheads here are effectively monsters because they’re depicted not as cannon fodder, but three-dimensional humans. The things that happen in Green Room are, to put it mildly, horrific. And if I were to make a list of the best movies of the twenty-first century, I’d rank it extremely high.
A wandering punk band is hard up for cash. They reluctantly end up taking a gig at a rundown neo-Nazi joint in the middle of nowhere. In true punk fashion, the band decides to rile up the crowd with a cover of “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” That goes over about as well as you might expect. Fortunately, the rest of their set is played hard enough to win the skinheads over by the end. After the show, the band heads back to the green room and accidentally discover the venue’s operators are covering up the murder of a young woman.
While the skinheads scramble to come up with a plan, the band is locked in the green room with a psychopath. He subtly mentions his revolver only holds five cartridges, “because they’re so fucking big that’s all that can fit in the cylinder.” Meanwhile, the neo-Nazis outside the room call Darcy Banker, their leader and the owner of the property. Banker is played by Patrick Stewart, whose performance is neither too cold or too hot. He’s not a man who relishes his villainy. His only motivation is to get the witnesses off his property as quickly as possible so he can murder them elsewhere.
The simple plan complicates quickly. Banker, who’s always failing to keep the situation from escalating, comes up with one idea after another to flush the band members out of the green room. He approaches the problem matter-of-factly, as if coordinating the extermination of rodents. To him, it’s just another problem in the life of a businessman, albeit an amoral one. Another interesting choice is the skinheads aren’t caricatures; when Banker loses his cool and humiliates one of his men, he promptly apologizes for his transgression. His henchmen aren’t expendable in his mind, they’re family.
There’s no fantasy violence here. There are no characters who do unbelievably heroic or villainous things. The good guys are gonna take a licking. Some of the bad guys are gonna take a licking, too. We all hate movies in which stupidly written characters do stupid things, but here’s a rare example in which smartly written characters do stupid things. After all, they’re young, immature, and panicking in a realistic way.
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