imogen poots

Chronologies of Trauma

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Kristen Stewart has great taste. You can tell that by how she’s capitalized on her Twilight notoriety in the past couple decades, leveraging her early teenybopper name recognition to work with directors like David Cronenberg, Pablo Larraín, Rose Glass, and Olivier Assayas in her cinematic adulthood. You can also tell by watching her own directorial debut The Chronology of Water, which features a flood of striking, well curated images that convey a deeper interest in the artform than you might expect from an actor-turned-director. Stewart smartly sidesteps a lot of the familiar pitfalls actors stumble into while transitioning to the opposite side of the camera. It’s typical for those projects to function largely as an acting showcase, allowing their performers an overly indulgent amount of onscreen real estate to run wild and chew scenery. She certainly gives her star, Imogen Poots, a lot to do as the film’s constantly flailing protagonist, but most of the meatier dramatic moments are chopped up & scattered throughout a purposefully chaotic edit, avoiding any potential backsliding into stage-play theatricality. However, that chaotic edit is where Stewart makes an entirely different kind of rookie mistake, the one most that young directors make when translating a novel that they love to the screen. Adapted from the eponymous Lidia Yuknavitch memoir, The Chronology of Water is a rushed, overlong onslaught that attempts to cram in every detail from its source text in direct illustration instead of re-interpreting that text for a new medium. The film covers author Yuknavitch’s life from traumatic childhood to literary notoriety, including long chapters of her story that mean more to her personally than they do to the filmgoing audience (such as her academic mentorship under Ken Kesey, portrayed onscreen by a haggard Jim Belushi). You can tell that Yuknavitch’s story meant a lot to Stewart on the page, and she wanted to bring it to the screen because of the vivid images it evoked, not because it was a convenient vehicle for hammy acting. She just never got a handle on the “kill your darlings” process of editing, choosing instead to stage every one of those images while Imogen Poots strings them together with a voiceover narration track pulled directly from the source text.

If there’s a textual justification for the way The Chronology of Water rushes through the details of Yuknavitch’s personal life, it’s that it takes a long while for the author to express what’s happened to her. We’re immediately aware that she grew up in an abusive household, cowering in fear of her monstrous father (Michael Epp), whose presence is a constant threat to her, her older sister (Thora Birch), and their alcoholic mother (Susannah Flood). At first, the only clear details of that abuse are the feelings of its effect, with the women of the house tiptoeing on eggshells to not draw the father’s attention, so that every sound in the mix thunderous & painful – like a snapping bone. As a high school & college-age Yuknavitch, Poots intentionally avoids processing those details for as long as she can, disappearing into drugs, alcohol, anonymous sex, and the adrenaline rush of competitive swimming instead of emotionally reckoning with what’s happened to her. It isn’t until she starts writing poetry and personal essays in the film’s back half that she can express the details of her childhood abuse in concrete terms, and the audience gets a much clearer, more horrific picture of what was done to her. Until that point, The Chronology of Water is constant rush of contextless snapshots from Yuknavitch’s life, but the connections between them and the memories that spark them start to make more sense by the time she’s learned to express herself instead of avoiding herself. It’s a conceptually interesting approach to telling Yuknavitch’s story, but the problem is that there’s so much crammed into the frame that the individual details leak through your fingers like water. Yuknavitch describes her semi-confessional approach to creative writing as “telling the truth in lies,” which is an axiom that Stewart finds inspirational but does not fully absorb herself. She’s too enamored with Yuknavitch’s writing to alter the details of her biography, attempting to preserve the truths from the page instead of re-interpreting them into a more coherent cinematic lie. Yes, drops of blood diluting into the water pooled on the shower floor makes for a gorgeous, evocative image, but that image is itself diluted by the excess of everything else Stewart throws at us in the 128min runtime.

I was thinking a lot about The Chronology of Water’s rushed, scatterbrained pacing while watching Catherine Breillat’s 2001 breakout Fat Girl, which screened at Gap Tooth the same week of its local release. Where Stewart rushes, Breillat cruelly dwells, forcing her audience to sit with the details of childhood sexual abuse as they’re happening in real time. Alternately titled under the dedication “For My Sister” in its original French, Fat Girl details the uneasy sisterhood shared by two French teenagers on a beachside vacation. The younger sister (Anaïs Reboux) is suffering the hellish awkwardness of puberty while the “older” one (Roxane Mesquida) believes herself to be a mature woman at the advanced age of 15. Her premature adulthood is challenged when she successfully attracts the romantic attentions of an Italian college boy who’s also vacationing nearby, and she finds herself inviting him over to the bedroom she shares with her less glamorous sister, who only halfway pretends to be asleep while the young couple fools around. A large portion of Fat Girl‘s runtime is dedicated to detailing the step-by-step process of coercive statutory rape, which is then downplayed & rationalized by two in-over-their-heads teenagers who are dabbling in sexual experiences they aren’t mature enough to fully interpret, much less consent to. Once this abusive tryst is inevitably discovered by the girls’ parents, the vacation understandably ends, and we travel back to their home in a tearful long-distance car ride menaced by big-rig trucks that threaten to physically crush the family with the slightest turn of a steering wheel. Then, Breillat physicalizes the constant threat of macho violence in a shocker ending so abrupt it practically plays like a punchline to a sick, sad joke. Even then, the teenage girl response to adult masculine violence is to play it off as no big deal, performing a kind of know-it-all maturity they couldn’t possibly have earned in their short time alive. In The Chronology of Water, the audience is just as distanced from the full brunt of that childhood trauma as the protagonist; in Fat Girl, we’re fully aware of what’s happening to the kids as it’s happening to them, even if they remain clueless until long after the end credits.

You don’t have to go all the way back into the early-aughts archives to find easy points of comparison for KStew’s directorial debut. If nothing else, it premiered at last year’s Cannes along with two fellow miserabilist coming-of-age dramas that tormented school-age swim teams: Julia Ducournau’s Alpha & Charlie Pollinger’s The Plague. Thanks to its seaside vacation setting, Breillat’s Fat Girl also offers a fair amount of swimming-pool escapism to its titular odd-girl-out protagonist, suggesting that there’s something about the sensory deprivation and bodily freedom of an underwater realm that’s a huge relief for teens going through pubescent hell (or for the audiences watching them go through it, anyway). The Chronology of Water and Fat Girl also share a thematic link in their depictions of sisterhood, in which a younger dead-eyed sibling suffers jealousy over the apparent grace & poise with which their older sister navigates the same childhood traumas. Truthfully, none of that was really why Breillat was on my mind while catching up with KStew’s debut. The reason The Chronology of Water had me thinking back to the abrasive, morally challenging feminism of the 2000s & 1990s was that Stewart was taking obvious delight in that era’s most transgressive provocations. Imogen Poots models the distinctly 1990s fashions of the source memoir’s setting, just as she models the social faux pas of a young affluent woman repeatedly using the word “cunt” in mixed company. Much like Breillat, Lidia Yuknavitch’s work is rooted in an era when it was more daring to talk about the supposedly shameful details of women’s bodies, and Stewart seems enthusiastic to bring every liquid she can from that text to the screen: blood, puke, spit, cum, shit, menstruate, the full flight. She makes a point to pause on a chapter when Yuknavitch finds that BDSM offers just as much bodily escapism as the swimming pool, depicting Poots being tied up & whipped by a professorial Kim Gordon. It’s a tangent so compelling that it could’ve inspired its own feature film, but Stewart has no time to dwell on it without sacrificing everything else that happens in Yuknavitch’s memoir, so she quickly moves on to the next unpleasant incident. Breillat offers you no such relief. Fat Girl is all one long, unpleasant incident, with child locks on the car doors to prevent your escape. Stewart may share Breillat’s furious enthusiasm for provocation, but she doesn’t yet fully match her talent for sadism, for (moral) better or for (artistic) worse.

-Brandon Ledet

28 Weeks Later (2007)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

I wasn’t expecting 28 Weeks Later to be as good as it was. It came out during a particularly academically rigorous (and financially unstable) year for me, and I’m not sure that I ever even saw any advertising for this one. Dismissal of the film by Alex Garland, who wrote both 28 Days Later and 28 Years Later, also never made me particularly interested in revisiting it, until I recently saw 28 Years and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve also always loved Robert Carlyle’s work as an actor, and his involvement also appealed to me. Although a friend let me know that this one is streaming on Tubi—just in time for the sequel’s release—I was able to find a DVD copy at my local video store, and I was pleasantly surprised, even if it isn’t as emotionally fulfilling as either of the films that precede or follow it. 

In the opening scene, Don Harris (Carlyle) is holed up in a rural farmhouse with his wife Alice and a few other survivors of the rage virus, sometime during the early days of the plague’s spread. An uninfected boy appears at the house and begs to be let in, and although they get him inside, the horde of infected who were chasing him then fall upon the house and kill/infect everyone inside. Only Don manages to escape, fleeing across the field to a small boat with an outboard motor and getting away, although not before he sees his wife at a window in the house, not yet dead or infected, as she pleads for help. Moments later, she’s gone from the window — too late. Some six or seven months (or 28 weeks, if you will) later, Don is now living in “District 1” of London, where British Isles residents who were out of the country when the outbreak occurred are being repatriated. The infected seem to have completely died out, having succumbed to starvation and exposure in the half a year since the Rage ravaged the population.

A NATO force overseen by Americans is assisting in the homecoming efforts and maintaining a military presence in order to protect the quarantine zone (epitomized in the form of Jeremy Renner’s sniper character, Doyle) and provide testing on the homebound travelers (represented by Scarlet, the chief medical officer played by Rose Byrne). Don’s two children, twelve-year-old Andy and teenaged Tammy (Imogen Poots) return home and are reunited with their father, who simplifies the story of their mother’s death by telling them only that she died. Their first night back, Andy confides in his sister that he worries he’ll forget his mother’s face, and the next morning the two of them slip through the NATO defenses and make their way to their old house to gather photos and other belongings. To their surprise, they find their mother there, albeit disoriented and confused, and she is immediately taken back to the base. Once there, Scarlet finds that Alice was bitten and that this means she is an asymptomatic carrier of the rage virus, and that her blood may even hold an answer to a potential vaccine or cure. Before she can convince General Stone (Idris Elba) of the potential, however, Alice has already Typhoid Mary-d the rage back into the safety zone, and it’s already too late to stop the spread. 

Despite Alex Garland’s less-than-enthusiastic position, 28 Weeks Later is quite good. It lacks a lot of the more humanistic elements of the first film, which followed Cillian Murphy’s Jim as he, having slept through the downfall of society and thus is awakened into a changed world without witnessing the staggering amount of violence and life-altering horror that made it so, manages to be the vessel that carries some manner of hope from the world that was into the world that is. Further, while 28 Days Later presaged what a modern urban center experiencing massive devastation might look like (according to legend, they were shooting Jim’s newly-awakened wanderings of deserted post-rage London when the news broke about the Twin Towers), 28 Weeks Later is heavily informed by contemporary events. The uselessness of the U.S. Army in a peacekeeping role seems clearly inspired by the handling of the so-called “War on Terror” in which the States were actively involved, and the choice of a stadium as an evacuation area and the overreaction of armed authority to refugees and evacuees is evocative of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That doesn’t stop the film’s treatment of the military from being a little “hoo-rah” in certain places, with Scarlet acting as the reasonable authority figure and Doyle evacuating survivors despite orders to kill on site, playing into tropes about good soldiers vs. morally questionable generals. Their ability to protect the citizens within seems doomed to failure from the start, based on the ease with which a couple of teenagers managed to slip out of the quarantine zone, so the criticism of the industrial complex holds. It’s also clever in its plotting, first showing us Alice’s heterochromia in the opening scene and then having Scarlet comment upon Andy having the same mutation during his intake to the quarantine zone, establishing that genetic adaptations like theirs are often inherited, slyly foreshadowing that Andy may have the same ability to be an asymptomatic carrier just like his mother. It’s not a movie that was simply slapped together because someone thought “there should be another one;” it’s genuinely a worthy, if different, successor to the first film. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Father (2021)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

At this point, there’s nothing especially novel about a movie simulating the first-person, subjective experience of dementia.  If nothing else, the reality-shifting dementia narrative has been attempted at least twice on the television shows Castle Rock & BoJack Horseman in recent years, which indulged in the exercise for one-off episodes.  It’s already become a genre template with its own firmly established rhythms & tropes, not much different than the stuck-at-the-airport or trapped-in-an-elevator episode templates of 90s sitcoms.  What those immersive dementia narratives don’t have in their arsenal, though, is the acting talents of Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins CBE (no offense meant to Sissy Spacek or Wendie Malick, who anchored their aforementioned TV episodes capably).  I don’t know if you’ve heard this before, but Anthony Hopkins is very talented.  Get this: he even won an Oscar for Best Actor this year for his work in his own dementia-driven actor’s showcase, The Father (his first win since 1992’s Silence of the Lambs).  And from the outside looking in, The Father looked like it was specifically designed for those kinds of Awards Season accolades, landing an already beloved, established actor enough highlight-reel worthy moments to look believably Oscar-worthy on a television broadcast.  In practice, though, The Father gives Hopkins much more to do than to simply collect gold-plated statues in a late-career victory lap.  It doesn’t reinvent the immersive-dementia-narrative template in any substantial, formalist way, but it does find a way to make it thunderously effective as an actor’s showcase, and Hopkins makes the most out of the opportunity in every single scene.

While Hopkins’s performance as the titular, increasingly demented father is the film’s centerpiece, much of the credit for that performance’s impact is owed to first-time director Florian Zeller.  Adapting his own eponymous stage play for the screen, Zeller dutifully follows the standard tropes & rhythms of the immersive dementia narrative.  We follow Hopkins through his subjective experience of place & time.  The physical details of the apartment he occupies and the faces of his caregivers transform as he loses track of where & when he is in the labyrinth of his own mind.  His nonlinear sense of reality prompts him to recall future events, while he also conveniently forgets past traumas in an endless loop of repeating, excruciating conversations.  It’s a mildly surreal experience, but not an unfamiliar one if you’ve seen it done on TV before.  What really distinguishes this example is the complexity and sudden stabs of cruelty in its stage play dialogue, all excellently performed (including supporting performances by other talented Brits like Olivia Coleman, Olivia Williams, and Imogen Poots).  Watching Hopkins viciously tear down the few people in his life trying to help him cuts through the narrative’s familiarity like a dagger, especially since you never stop feeling for him even when he’s at his worst.  His basic persona shifts just as much as his sense of reality & time.  Within a single conversation, he’ll transform from an adorable flirt to a heartless monster, devastating the family members & nurses who’re struggling to care for him despite his stubborn pride & prickly demeanor. 

Sometimes Hopkins is deeply befuddled, his mind visibly buffering to reorganize the details of his environment until they make sense.  Sometimes he’s scarily sharp, psychologically eviscerating his loved ones with a throwback Hannibal Lecter sense of caustic wit.  That alternation between vulnerability and cruelty feels directly tied to stage play writing, recalling the tender-vicious turns of dialogue in works by Edward Albee, August Wilson, or Tracy Letts.  This movie earned a lot of attention for the subtle shifts in its set design and the surrealism of its demented reality.  Its real strengths are much simpler and even more familiar than its immersive dementia narrative, though.  It’s most impactful for providing an astonishingly talented actor with complexly written dialogue and setting him loose on the stage.  Unfortunately, time is linear, so it’s likely we won’t see many more virtuoso performances from Hopkins as the years march on, much less any of this high caliber.  His Oscar win was mildly controversial due to this year’s messy, Soderberghian Oscar ceremony billboarding a tribute to Chadwick Boseman that never came together.  That might’ve made for an embarrassing television broadcast and a major disappointment to Boseman’s most ardent mourners, but at least the work that was rewarded instead of Boseman’s stands out as something substantially, recognizably great.  If Boseman’s nomination had been upstaged by Gary Oldman for Mank or Rami Malek for Bohemian Rhapsody there’d be a lot more to be angry about.

-Brandon Ledet

Vivarium (2020)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

In some ways, I’m a little bummed that I didn’t have the chance to see the absurdist sci-fi chiller Vivarium on the big screen (due to this year’s ongoing COVID-19 closures). Not only is the theatrical environment my preferred way of experiencing any movie for the first time, but I suspect this film’s discomforting twists & turns would have been especially fun with a gasping crowd. At the same time, discovering this film alone at home might have been a blessing. Watching it in public almost certainly would have been one of those cringy experiences where I’m the only person in the room laughing at a film’s dark, peculiar sense of humor, and it’s probably for the best that I spared fellow theater-goers that annoyance. I knew this film was going to be grim & abrasive; I just didn’t expect that it was going to be so funny. It has a very cruel but highly successful sense of humor to it (almost exclusively about resenting your own spouse & child).

Imogen Poots & Jesse Eisenberg costar as a young couple in search of a suburban starter home to begin their life together, only to get trapped in a hellishly bland eternity of supernatural imprisonment in that very abode. Their relationship here, while explicitly romantic & monogamous, is no less combative than it was when they first paired up as violent nemeses in last year’s The Art of Self-Defense. The cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood they’re trapped in is an endlessly repeating grid of identical CGI houses, resembling more of a board game or a Sims neighborhood than an irl landscape. They’re completely isolated—quarantined, if you will—in a flavorless suburban prison, interrupted only by Amazon deliveries of their daily necessities and the arrival of the world’s most annoying child, whom they are obligated to raise to adulthood. It’s all an unveiled, naked metaphor about how frustrating & unfulfilling the suburban nuclear family lifestyle can be, and it only gets ghastlier as they sink further into their excruciatingly pointless domestic routine.

I’m not surprised to discover that this film is divisive, even among horror & sci-fi nerds who’d normally be on its wavelength. The central metaphor is unashamedly blatant; the disruptive child character is 1000x more shrill & frustrating than even the kid in The Babadook; and watching a young couple become exponentially sick of each other for 97 minutes is a deliberately tough sit. All I can say is that its antiromantic misanthropy really worked for me. I was even outright delighted by it, which feels perverse to say about a film that is so relentlessly miserable in tone. Vivarium is a cartoon exaggeration of the long-simmering frustrations & resentments that accompany even the most successful of romantic partnerships. It gawks at the traditional, decades-long monogamous marriage as if it were a sideshow attraction at the county fair, amused but disgusted by the freakish unnatural behavior we’re all supposed to aspire to.

Maybe going straight to VOD this year was ultimately the perfect release strategy for this film, since months of social distancing has cranked up the heat on any & all minor annoyances couples already had simmering on the backburner in a way that should help the movie resonate with its literally captive audience. If nothing else, watching this exhausted, joyless couple stare slack-jawed at their hyperactive child as it runs screeching through their house/prison felt familiar to a COVID-specific variety of tweets where parents complain about not being able to ship their kids off to daycare for a much-needed breather. Selfishly, I’m also a little glad I was blocked from catching it on the big screen because I almost certainly would have been laughing a little too loud at the film’s cruelly antiromantic absurdism, only making the experience even more grating for my fellow moviegoers. It’s already abrasive enough without my braying contributions.

-Brandon Ledet

I Kill Giants (2018)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

The 1980s saw a wealth of children’s fantasy films that were incredibly dark in theme & tone, considering their target audience. Titles like Return to Oz, The Never-Ending Story, The Dark Crystal, and Paperhosue seemed custom designed to bore parents out of the room just so they could scare children shitless as soon as they were alone with the VCR. These tonally hazy fantasy films are a little too traumatic for most kids and a little too precious for most adults, but they can generate a fascinating tension through that divide. There are plenty of modern entries into that canon keeping the tradition alive too; they just tend to be minor indie releases too few people get to see: MirrorMask, American Fable, The Hole, etc. Let’s go ahead and add I Kill Giants to the traumatic children’s fantasy movie pantheon. Remarkably similar to the recent dark fantasy drama A Monster Calls in both themes & tone, it might be tempting to pass off I Kill Giants as a lesser echo of that more accomplished work. The truth is, though, that both films are part of a larger tradition and work exceptionally well as companion pieces, especially since I Kill Giants offers a version of A Monster Calls’s dark fantasy template through a more femme POV.

Like A Wrinkle in Time, I Kill Giants is the perfect fantasy piece for gloomy middle schoolers who believe they’re fundamentally different from all the “other girls.” Truthfully, all middle school girls would probably self-identity as being Not Like Other Girls, but the giant-killing anti-hero of this film pushes that personality trait to the extreme. Dressed like a feral Louise Belcher left to run wild & dingy in the New England wilderness (bunny ears & all), our troubled protagonist finds herself at the center of a mythical battle everyone else in her small town seems to willingly ignore. Deploying homemade steampunk contraptions of her own invention (straight out of The Book of Henry), and casting spells & potions like an amateur woodland witch, she serves as a self-elected protector of her town against the impending threat of murderous giants. Since she’s an avid D&D player and a fantasy illustrator with a vivid imagination, it’s unclear if these giant CGI threats at the edge of the woods & ocean are “real.” Her obsession with their looming danger makes her hopelessly socially awkward around peers and her hexes are often interpreted by authority figures to be frivolous vandalism, but she very well may be saving those lives from the towering brutes they rationalize as “tornadoes and earthquakes and crap.” What is clear, however, is that she is using her pursuit of the giants as an excuse to avoid dealing with a mysterious trauma in her own home, the reveal of which serves as the film’s cathartic release.

Ultimately, I don’t believe I Kill Giants uses its killer-giants metaphor as a way of dealing with Death & bullying through a childhood lens quite as well as the thematically similar A Monster Calls; it certainly doesn’t have as sharply specific of a point to make about processing trauma through that device, at least. However, it does work well enough on its own terms to survive the comparison, especially once it finds its narrative grooves in the relationships our emotionally-battered protagonist establishes with her best friend, her school psychologist, and her older sister (the latter of whom are played by Zoe Saldana & Imogen Poots, respectively). If the movie needs to separate itself from J.A. Bayona’s similarly gloomy children’s literature adaptation (I Kill Giants was adapted from a 2008 graphic novel, while A Monster Calls’s own illustrated source material was published in 2011, so who cares), its existence is more than justified by reframing the story with a femme perspective and finding its emotional core in a wide range of female bonds. It’s an unnecessary distinction to have to make, though, since both films are part of a much larger dark children’s fantasy tradition. If you normally fall in love with films that hover between child’s imagination sensibilities & traumatically adult themes, you’re likely to find worthwhile qualities in either picture. If that tension is not usually your cup of genre movie tea, though, I doubt I Kill Giants will be the one to finally win you over.

-Brandon Ledet

Green Room (2016)

/ swampflix / 11 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

With his last two features writer/director Jeremy Saulnier has carved out a nice, little niche for himself in constructing intimate, terrifying thrillers about folks who are in way over their heads (in blood & viscera). His last film, Blue Ruin, was a tightly-wound revenge thriller in which a doomed, ordinary man took on an organized criminal syndicate despite his ineptitude for violence in a private war he instigates (or avenges, depending on your perspective). His attempts at violence are ugly & disastrous, as he fucks up constantly, but the inertia of the plot doesn’t allow him any viable options but to continue on anyway. There isn’t much of a difference in Saulnier’s follow-up, The Green Room, except a change in scenery and a shift in perspective from revenge to survival in its central plot concerns. The Green Room somehow feels less special & more pared down than Blue Ruin, but it’s still an effective thriller that never loosens its chokehold on the audience’s throat throughout its runtime thanks to an increasingly limited set of options for a positive outcome for any one of its characters, protagonist or otherwise.

Fictional hardcore punk band The Ain’t Rights (featuring Burying the Ex‘s Anton Yelchin & The Final Girls‘s Alia Shawkat among its members) are struggling to make it home from a disastrous road tour, resorting to siphoning gas & camping roadside to ease their financial desperation. Keeping their punk band ethics D.I.Y. & internet presence free, the band finds themselves in the fragile situation of playing one last gig for an isolated skinhead (ne0-Nazi) community (run by a no-nonsense, ice-cold Patrick Stewart). As soon as The Ain’t Rights open their set with a cover of the Dead Kennedys’s classic diddy “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” the vulnerability of their situation becomes terrifyingly apparent & only gets worse as the plot thickens & the chokehold tightens. After their set The Ain’t Rights accidentally uncover a couple nasty secrets their racist/militaristic punk show hosts are hiding at their concert venue/compound and the situation snowballs into a total nightmare where they’re locked in a small, windowless dressing room with no hope for escape except an all-out bloodbath where the ill-prepared youngsters aren’t likely to survive. Spoiler alert for those unfamiliar with this kind of genre fare: most of them don’t.

If there’s a prevailing concern that drives every scene of The Green Room it’s authenticity. Scenes of D.I.Y. punk kids drinking beers, listening to records, getting dead serious about their biggest artistic influences during college radio interviews, and having out-of-body religious experiences while thrashing around in a mosh pit all feel true to the punk scene as I know/remember it, albeit without the stench of body odor that would seal the deal. Apparently The Thermals frontman Hutch Harris was brought in as a coach for this aspect of the film, which is about the cutest thing I’ve heard of since Deb Harry handed out “punk rock merit badges” to the Frog Scouts on The Muppet Show. I only have to assume that the skinhead scene is represented with the same level of authenticity, as I’ve thankfully had very few experiences with their presence at New Orleans D.I.Y. shows. I’d like to see a version of this kind of punk scene thriller without these white power monsters’ involvement, but the movie seems well-researched in their representation. At the very least it gives the same fetishistic attention to the various designations of their bootlace colors as Friedkin gave to the gay S&M scene’s handkerchief coding in Cruising.

The Green Room‘s authenticity doesn’t stop at its depictions of D.I.Y. punk culture, either. The violence is some of the most horrifically brutal, gruesome gore I’ve seen in a long while, not least of all because it’s treated with the real life severity that’s often missing in the cheap horror films that misuse it. Each disgusting kill hits with full force, never feeling like a frivolous indulgence, and the resulting tone is an oppressive cloud of unending dread. From the Dead Kennedys cover to the end credits my veins were pulsing so hard they felt as if they might explode. That’s a sign of a highly effective thriller, but it wasn’t necessarily a feeling I’d wish to return to at any point.

The Green Room amplifies the hopeless situation of Blue Ruin by confining its action to an extremely limited space & uping the potential number of lives at stake, but I couldn’t help but find the plight of Saulnier’s in-over-their-heads protagonists a little repetitive here. There are some truly great, small moments in the film (the religious experience in the mosh pit especially stands out), but in a larger context I felt it was mostly delivering a heart-racing sensation of fear & apprehension. It was intense in the moment, but felt like somewhat of a cheap thrill once I reached the relief of the end credits. As a genre picture I think The Green Room checks off all the right boxes & delivers everything you could ask for as an audience looking to cower & sweat. However, I’d love to see Saulnier switch gears in the future & push where else he can take that intensity/authenticity with an entirely different set of genre expectations.

-Brandon Ledet