This is the film Eli Roth wishes he could make.

I'm convinced this shit really happened and I was watching real footage. I've said movies have felt real before, but my word this was REAL!

If ya'll thought Furiosa and Rey were bad ass ladies, wait until you see Amber (Imogen Poots)...holy guacamole.

Dr. Xavier trades in his wheelchair for a gang of psychotic neo nazis. Patrick Stewart plays the ultimate puppet master. The man is terrifying. He's cold, menacing, and sinister.

This movie isn't just violent and gory for the sake of being violent and gory.. (cough*ELIROTH*cough). The violence comes from a place of plot and character, there's a purpose for it.

Jeremy Saulnier knows how to handle tone…

"We didn't do anything."

A lean genre microcosm on the dangers of passivity, mostly. The punk-posturing bandmates made complicit in an act of collective hatred & violence by allowing it to fester in their scene/community/country. The best decision Saulnier makes here is presenting that collective hatred as restrained, organized, and calculating, even civil (I half expected them to plan a brunch at one point!), suggesting that its key to survival is to subtly, and not unintelligibly, infect the same groups & spaces we operate in.

There's also a really interesting thread, for a film many have read as sadistic, about violence *not* being in our nature; Saulnier choosing to highlight all kinds of different ways violence is taught to us (the constant…

94/100

Green Room doesn't fuck around. Clocking in at a lean and mean 95 minute run-time, Jeremy Saulnier's third feature film is unnervingly swift, curating the entirety of its gruesome atmosphere through quiet character moments. Akin to Saulnier's previous (and brilliant) effort Blue Ruin, it settles into an indistinct, melancholic rhythm, only to be ripped to shreds by furious specters visualized in an array of ghastly imagery. With a talented cast more than capable of handling the material, success was inevitable, but Saulnier hits a grand slam instead of a mere home run, catapulting a piece of B genre heaven into a genuine masterclass of suspense.

Its tension doesn't come from traditional audience/director alchemy or jump-scare tactics, but palpable fear…