Jeremy Saulnier

Rebel Ridge: Duck the Police

Jeremy BeckReviews
Don Johnson and Aaron Pierre in Rebel Ridge

Up until now, Jeremy Saulnier has been something of an “Imagine if” filmmaker. Whether centering on a hapless schmo embroiled in a deadly noir (Blue Ruin) or a punk-rock band trapped by bloodthirsty Nazis (Green Room), his movies have thrust ordinary people into impossible situations, forcing you to contemplate how you might respond in such drastic scenarios. With Rebel Ridge, he attempts to heighten both sides of his unbalanced equation while retaining the same fundamental sense of helplessness. The hero here is the opposite of an everyman; he’s smart, determined, and physically gifted. But he’s still the underdog, because the foe he’s facing is no less than the very institution of American policing.

The chief pleasure of Rebel Ridge is how it packages its big ideas—about racism, class entrenchment, and state-sanctioned violence—into a story that’s small-scale and tidy. Well, initially; as the film progresses, its thematic ambitions grow broader, which has the paradoxical effect of diminishing its boldness. Still, even if Saulnier isn’t always in full control of his thornier ideas, he remains in complete command of his immediate environment. As a polemic, Rebel Ridge is provocative but also uneven; as an action movie, it’s terrific. Read More

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Green Room: Beware of Dog and Neo-Nazis

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anton Yelchin, Joe Cole, and Alia Shawkat, trapped in "Green Room"

“When you take it all virtual, you lose the texture,” Pat says early in Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier’s lean, nasty, uncompromising new thriller. Pat, played by the squirrelly actor Anton Yelchin, is speaking about his band’s grass-roots approach to music, but he’s also serving as a mouthpiece for his writer-director. A roughneck at heart, Saulnier doesn’t so much defy cinema’s technological advances—like most low-budget filmmakers, he shoots in digital, a relatively newfangled technique—but exploits them to make movies that are primal and proudly unpolished. His previous feature, Blue Ruin, embraced a popular genre (the revenge picture) while simultaneously upending that genre’s conventions, but it was most noticeable for its atmosphere, a queasy aura of sweat, grime, and helpless panic. Now he brings us Green Room, a terror film about a handful of people locked in a tiny space, desperate to escape. Its setup is familiar, but its execution is marvelously visceral. The result is both exhilarating and oddly strangulating—you cannot help but enjoy this movie’s assaultive body blows, even as its hands begin to tighten around your neck.

Pat is the bassist for the Ain’t Rights, a punk-rock four-piece also featuring lead singer Tiger (Callum Turner), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat, miles from her iconic role on Arrested Development), and drummer Reece (Joe Cole, from the BBC’s Peaky Blinders). They’re touring the Pacific Northwest, though “touring” is a generous term for their ritual, which consists of scrounging for gigs at sparsely populated clubs and siphoning gas from parked cars to keep their rundown van moving. After plowing through a particularly humiliating performance that nets them six bucks apiece, they get wind of another opportunity outside nearby Portland, which they accept eagerly. When they arrive at the venue—a backwoods bar just east of nowhere—they discover that they’ve been mislabeled “The Aren’t Rights” and, more disconcertingly, that the place is populated by skinheads and is adorned with Nazi paraphernalia. Being iconoclasts, they settle on a special number for the opening song of their set: a cover of Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off!”. Read More

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