Director of cinematography turned director Jeremy Saulnier is one of the most exciting new voices in American cinema right now. Earlier this week, Guillermo del Toro co-signed on the virtues of Saulnier’s critically acclaimed breakthrough 2013 film “Blue Ruin.”
Film: Blue Ruin by Jeremy Saulnier. With a beautiful central performance by Macon Blair, the film is inventive and assured thriller/drama.
— Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) January 18, 2016
Saulnier’s subsequent thriller “Green Room” will arrive this spring —breathlessly praised out of Cannes and Fantastic Fest last year (read our review here), it has a simple yet brutally effective premise: a punk rock band playing a neo-Nazi skinhead club stumbles upon a horrific act of violence and then suddenly must run for their lives.
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“Blue Ruin” didn’t feature much in the way of big stars, but “Green Room” features a lot of name talent, including Patrick Stewart as the head neo-Nazi, and the band is comprised by Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat, Callum Turner and Joe Cole. The movie also features Imogen Poots, Mark Webber and Macon Blair, the star of “Blue Ruin.” Here’s the official synopsis:
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.
“The result is an exciting, splattery, funny genre movie that somehow never once feels disposable, and one that should prove a midnight movie delight for some time to come,” the Playlist’s own Oli Lyttleton wrote. A24 opens the thriller on April 1st. Check out some new photos below.
Photos removed at the request of A24.