Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room is punk rock horror that takes no prisoners

At its heart, Green Room is a stripped-down drive-in classic that spares no feelings and gives no fucks. It's hard to think of a horror film from the past few years with a body count that even comes close. Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier (2013's Blue Ruin) has a gift for viscerally shocking violence that is never aestheticized or depicted in a way that allows the viewer to distance what is depicted on screen from what it represents. Death is cruel, fast and vicious — the film remains resolutely honest on that front (with razor-sharp editing courtesy of former Nashvillian Julia Bloch). If John Carpenter had developed an amphetamine habit in the late '70s and early '80s, he could have made this film right in between The Fog and Escape From New York.

The titular green room is the place where The Ain't Rights, a punk band from the outskirts of D.C. limping their way across the Western U.S. on siphoned gas and cobbled-together gigs, have found themselves: It's plaster and wood, with that vaguely '70s elementary-school shade of off-pea-green covering the walls, wherever they peek out from behind the myriad of 88 stickers, swastikas, white power slogans and a giant Confederate flag. It's an intimidating space for the band, and also for the viewer. The Why of it is relatable, to the extent that we don't question why they would take the isolated gig at a "boots and braces" roadhouse. Any artist having to toil in the contemporary economy, where it's been made nearly impossible to make a living making art, could be coaxed into taking a bit of risk for a quality payday that would at least let you break even. It's not even greed that kick-starts the film's engine — just a chance to save face before internal tensions shred the band.

It's a bold move on Saulnier's part, placing The Ain't Rights in these desperate straits way before they find themselves besieged by neo-Nazis. And there's a creepy resonance in the way the film's neo-Nazi organization is structured like the corporate world, where an organized hierarchy dispassionately assesses profit versus damages at all times, assigning resources and doling out dollars to fix the problems that assail their setup. It's just that those resources are attack dogs and machete-wielding red lacers who are upholding all they believe in (or have been trained to believe in) by shedding blood, and the problem to be fixed is The Ain't Rights, who have witnessed the aftermath of a murder. From that setup, the viewer is swept up in a white-knuckle test of human endurance, nimbly scored to a span of punk, grind and thrash (including Battletorn, featuring Nashville's own Omid Torn).

Presiding over it all is Darcy (Patrick Stewart). If you'd said, or even guessed, that one day one of the most beloved SciFicons of our time would be haunting your nightmares declaiming racist propaganda in soft voice, you would have been thought mad. No more. Stewart's Darcy is a stunning performance keyed to keeping the audience on edge at all times, deliberate, focused and never letting his tone betray him. Darcy is a malign signifier for the mesh of ideology and organization ("This is a movement, not a party," he tells the venue at one point, sounding like a faculty adviser), and he terrifies.

The rest of the cast — a deft combination of recognizable faces (Anton Yelchin and Imogen Poots, reunited from the vastly underrated 2011 Fright Night remake, Alia "Maeby Fünke forever" Shawkat) and some of the best character actors in the game (yes, that is Eric Edelstein, the voice of Grizzly from We Bare Bears, as Big Justin, and longtime Saulnier muse Macon Blair as the incarnation of neo-Nazi middle management) — is suitably charged-up. The whole thing follows the longtime Joe Bob Briggs maxim that a great movie is one where absolutely anybody can die at any moment, and Green Room takes that to heart and runs with it.

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