Green Room

I would like to go on record to say that it's really starting to annoy me how poorly lit a lot of movies are starting to become.  Darkness can be used effectively and can be used to create atmosphere, but when a movie is so dark that sometimes the action and even the characters are indistinguishable from each other, it just is laughable.  Such is the case with Green Room, a thriller that is mostly effective, except for the fact large parts of the film almost can't be seen, due to how little lighting there is in certain crucial moments.

The premise: A small time punk rock band made up of four friends have the misfortune to book a gig at a forgotten and dingy dive located in the middle of a barren wilderness, and filled with Neo Nazis and Skinheads.  The band is made up of  Pat (Anton Yelchin), Sam (Alia Shawkat), Reece (Joe Cole) and Tiger (Callum Turner).  The friends perform their set and collect their money, but just as they are about to leave, they happen to witness a dead body in the green room backstage.  The men working the bar trap the band inside the room with the body, and with an innocent bystander named Amber (Imogeen Poots).  As the victims trapped in the room wonder what is going to happen to them, the owner of the bar, Darcy Banker (Patrick Stewart, effectively playing against type here as a cold and calculating villain), decides that the only way to handle the situation is to kill the witnesses and clean up the mess afterward, pretending nothing has happened.  The young victims must now try to survive the night as they fend off Darcy's hired thugs and vicious attack dogs.

The first half of Green Room is the most effective, where the people trapped within the Room and their tormentors engage in a battle of wits.  Patrick Stewart may seem like an unusual choice to play the head of a bunch of burly thugs and skinheads, but his performance is effectively chilling.  No, this is not the first time Stewart has played a villain in a film, but the way he is so calm and almost cordial about the whole ordeal not only makes the character more frightening, but also gives the impression that this is not the first time he has been placed in this situation.  The movie builds some wonderful tension as the band tries to figure out a way to escape from their prison without being seen, and all of the young actors play well off each other as they bounce about ideas of how to escape, and whether anyone in this place can be trusted.

Then, the movie slowly but surely changes gears, and turns into an action thriller instead of a psychological one.  Here is where writer-director Jeremy Saulnier suddenly decides to shoot certain scenes almost in total darkness for reasons that escape me.  Oh, I can certainly understand certain scenes.  A sequence where one of the victims is viciously attacked and killed by a dog seems to have been edited heavily and shot at close angles in order to secure the film an R-rating.  But other times, the characters just seem to be wandering about in the dark, and it gets to the point where I got impatient.  This is a similar problem I had with the action thriller Triple 9 from earlier this year.  Both movies stage some key action sequences in such dark and tight spaces, it can be hard to tell what's going on at times, or who is getting attacked or killed.

It's not that I have any real issue with movies that use darkness, it simply has to be used effectively.  Just shooting the action in dark and narrow corridors does not build suspense or atmosphere.  You have to use the darkness of the scene, and shoot it in such a way that the audience can still keep track of what's going on.  I am reminded of the old black and white noir films, where the shadows almost seemed to be a character in the screenplay, and every scene was effectively and beautifully shot.  Recent movies that try to shoot almost entirely in darkness often come across as muddy and dull looking.  Something has changed over the years.  Filmmakers either don't know how to shoot in darkness, or they have lost their nerve.  There are still some beautiful dark films out there, but it is becoming more of a rarity.

Green Room has effective performances and more than a few tense moments, but the way it was shot annoyed me a great deal.  I do hope that the next time around, Mr. Saulnier learns how to shoot around the darkness better.  I want to see more of his vision and images.

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