Green Room (2016)

Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room arrives with a premise that sounds engineered for a seminar and an execution that is anything but. A punk band plays a skinhead bar in the Oregon woods, witnesses a murder, and spends the rest of the runtime trying not to be killed. The villains are neo-Nazis, which puts race at the center of the conflict, and the film never pretends otherwise. Yet the ideology is scenery, not argument. These are white supremacists as a logistical hazard, a hostile terrain with swastikas on the wall. The movie has no interest in diagnosing American racism. It wants to get four musicians out of a locked room, and it pursues that goal with a fire extinguisher and a box cutter.

The cast includes Alia Shawkat, an actor of Iraqi descent, among an otherwise white ensemble, and the film makes no narrative point of it whatsoever. She is a band member who happens to be there, which is the least a film can do and, in 2015, still counted as something. Imogen Poots's Amber is the more instructive case. She fights, survives, and cuts a man open to confirm he is dead, all without a single speech about her place in the world. That is capability as genre convention, not as statement. The picture condemns neo-Nazism the only way it knows how, by having its heroes kill them one at a time. No monologue required.

Elsewhere the cupboard is bare. No LGBTQ characters or subtext. No environmental concern. No economic critique, since the villains run a drug operation and the film views them as predators instead of capitalists. No body diversity, no neurodivergent figures, no revisionist history. That leaves a lean and genuinely vicious piece of craft, ninety minutes of pressure and arterial spray, with a moral position that amounts to: these people are bad, and they should lose. A reasonable position. It is also not a lecture, and the film knows better than to give one.