Green Room finally opens nationwide today, and if you read this site it’s a movie you should be well aware of by now (see review here, interviews with the director and stars here and here). Just in case you aren’t (I forgive you, kind of), or even if you are, today we’ve got this brand new exclusive clip to celebrate Green Room‘s imminent arrival at your local theater. Unless you want to avoid spoilers of any kind and just go see it, that makes a lot of sense too.
Here’s the official rundown:
GREEN ROOM is a brilliantly crafted and wickedly fun horror-thriller starring Patrick Stewart as a diabolical club owner who squares off against an unsuspecting but resilient young punk band. Down on their luck punk rockers The Ain’t Rights are finishing up a long and unsuccessful tour, and are about to call it quits when they get an unexpected booking at an isolated, run-down club deep in the backwoods of Oregon. What seems merely to be a third-rate gig escalates into something much more sinister when they witness an act of violence backstage that they weren’t meant to see. Now trapped backstage, they must face off against the club’s depraved owner, Darcy Banker (Stewart), a man who will do anything to protect the secrets of his nefarious enterprise. But while Darcy and his henchmen think the band will be easy to get rid of, The Ain’t Rights prove themselves much more cunning and capable than anyone expected, turning the tables on their unsuspecting captors and setting the stage for the ultimate life-or-death showdown. Intense, emotional, and ingeniously twisted, Green Room is genre filmmaking at its best and most original. Saulnier continues to build his reputation as one of the most exciting and distinctive directors working today, with a movie that’s completely different from his previous, highly acclaimed Blue Ruin, but which is just as risk-taking and even more full of twists. The entire cast deliver first-rate performances, but Patrick Stewart gives a transformative and brilliantly devious turn as Darcy-elegant yet lethal, droll yet terrifying, Stewart makes the film simply unforgettable.
I don’t want to overhype this for you, but I get the sense that movies like Green Room are trying to blow up the traditional divide between arthouse and multiplex, and that’s reason enough for me to be a cheerleader. I want to live in a world where multiplex movies don’t have to be dumb and predictable, and limited releases don’t have to be tasteful and sort of dull. Don’t you?
Green Room opens today nationwide.
Vince Mancini is a writer, comedian, and podcaster. A graduate of Columbia’s non-fiction MFA program, his work has appeared on FilmDrunk, the UPROXX network, the Portland Mercury, the East Bay Express, and all over his mom’s refrigerator. Fan FilmDrunk on Facebook, find the latest movie reviews here.