Green Room [Film review]

Abstract

In his latest cinematic foray Green Room (2015), one that again calls attention to a colour in its title, Saulnier pits a group of young punk musicians against the members of a white supremacist group, after the former unwittingly stumble upon a crime scene. Once again, so-to-speak ‘real’ people are put in ‘movie’ situations where they blunder their way through one adversity after another, most of which are the result of bad judgement calls and poor choices taken on the spur of the moment. Nonetheless, despite the fortuitous-ness that such an approach might imply, the overall narrative still subscribes to the conventional three-act structure and reverts to long-standing tropes particular to a specific genre, following them rather religiously. In the case of Green Room, it is the slasher film, a subgenre of horror that usually involves teens trapped inside a location (a house, a cabin in the woods or, in this case, a room), a ruthless murderer and a high body count. [Excerpt]