The best movie to watch right now is a 10-year-old punk rock thriller

Much of the horror-thriller Green Room, released 10 years ago on April 15, 2016, feels timeless: It’s a siege thriller about a scrappy punk band who stumble into the aftermath of a murder and must hole up in a club as bad guys surround them, hoping to get rid of all witnesses. The movie doesn’t avoid modern trappings — both the heroes and villains strategize about the use of cell phones, at least early on — but its basic set-up travels easily across time. Minus a few smartphones, Green Room could take place in the late 1970s, during the advent of punk. For that matter, minus the punk rock element, it could take place in the Old West.

The specific stripe of the film’s villains, though, is perfectly 2016 in retrospect. As late as the film’s original premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015, the gang of Nazi punks called in at the behest of the rock club’s skinhead owner might have seemed like an evil throwback to match the more positive DIY spirit of the Ain’t Rights, the movie’s gas-siphoning, Dead Kennedys-covering protagonists. But by the time of the film’s commercial release in 2016, the presidential election was coalescing around a resurgence of white nationalism.

With greater distance, the Nazis of Green Room look both quaint and au courant. The way their nastiness is just-barely couched in the language of preservation — a sticker on the club’s dressing-room wall notes that anti-racism actually means anti-white — matches the white-grievance culture fostered by Donald Trump, where racism only counts if it’s self-confessed (if at all). On the other hand, the fact that these particular Nazis are more easily recognizable as a punk subculture captures how many people felt (whether accurately or not) about genuine white-power groups before 2016: Obviously they were out there, but they were presumed to be playing to a dwindling audience at remote clubs like the one in this movie.

The Ain’t Rights don’t set out to play a white-power club, of course. Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier doesn’t even establish an obligatory sense of dread in the lead-up to the band’s ill-fated matinee show in the woodsy Pacific Northwest. Nor does he sugarcoat the life of a touring band. As the movie opens, they’re out of gas (two of them have to bike to a town 10 miles away to siphon fuel from cars in a roller-rink parking lot). Shortly thereafter, they’re mostly out of money (a change to one of their booked shows results in band members netting less than seven bucks apiece), and already weary about the journey their van must make back across the country to their DC-area home. But Saulnier also captures the camaraderie and shared values of this scene, centering on the nervous earnestness of bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin) and the wry pragmatism of guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat).

The only real foreshadowing is the ruthless efficiency with which Saulnier establishes his characters and their milieu; the entire pre-club section of the movie takes all of 12 minutes. The most obvious example of the movie’s concision comes when the band crashes at a fellow punk’s apartment for the night. One of them puts on a punk record, and just after the familiar “1-2-3-4!” opening cry, Saulnier cuts immediately to the next morning, the band just waking up, the record spinning endlessly at the end of its side. We don’t hear any of the actual music, but we get the picture. Most impressively, it’s an inviting one, despite the group’s low-budget living.

Desperate for some extra cash, the Ain’t Rights accept their host’s offer to hook them up with a better last-minute gig a few hours away. He warns them about the crowd (advising them not to talk politics with anyone and “play your earlier stuff”), but downplays their leanings, appealing to their sense that a gig’s a gig. Unnerved by more overt white-power vibes once they arrive at the club, the band opens with a nervy cover of “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” daring the crowd to turn on them. Some thrown bottles and menacing looks aside, they don’t, and the band completes their set — only to accidentally find some Nazi thugs standing over a dead body in the club’s green room. They’re held captive alongside fellow witness Amber (Imogen Poots) as the Nazis summon club owner and lead skinhead Darcy (Patrick Stewart), who wants the mess cleaned up.

What follows is a siege thriller that’s both scarier and gorier than most outright horror movies. As in his earlier Blue Ruin, Saulnier is unsparing with the details of how messy violence can be, especially among the inexperienced. Characters get brutally wounded and killed; one of the leads winds up held together with duct tape. (The gnarliness is convincing enough to distract from the fact that he somehow fails to pass out.) Poots is particularly eerie as a young woman who’s narcotized by the doom around her, lingering in the green room like a zonked ghost, yet also willing to spring into ultraviolet action.

Image: A24

Just as Green Room’s bad guys hybridize old-fashioned and up-to-the-minute threats, Green Room hovers between horror-movie terror and action-movie catharsis. It lacks the vengeful anti-Nazi kick of something like Inglourious Basterds (probably intentionally), but when our heroes do get the drop on their pursuers, their triumphs are enormously satisfying. All four band members, along with the ghostly presence of Amber, instantly feel like the rootable Final Girl, before Saulnier even makes those designations. The movie is both a thrill ride and a harrowing bad trip.

That duality is all over Green Room, not always so intentional. Yelchin is terrific here, such a winning yet believable presence, with a wonderful interrupted “pep talk” (as the more disaffected Amber calls it) delivered in two parts. This standing as one of his best performances also means the fact of his tragic death just months after the movie’s release hangs over the film. It’s grimly fitting, though: Saulnier vividly depicts the accidental romance of living in moments before everything went terribly wrong.

Green Room is currently streaming on Netflix.

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