Green Room

Life on the road is tough for The Ain't Rights. Broke, tired, and at each other's throats after a cancelled gig, the DIY punk band accepts one more sketchy matinee show, at a compound in the backwoods of Oregon, just so they won't have to keep siphoning gas for the long drive home to Virginia. The booker assures them things will go fine as long as they "don't talk politics" — which seems easy enough, until they take the stage facing an audience of neo-Nazi skinheads. The Ain't Rights' decision to kick off the set with a cover of the Dead Kennedys' "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" does not go over well. Amazingly, the rest of their set does.

It's not until they're backstage that our plucky punk quartet — bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat, also at Midnight Madness in The Final Girls), singer Tiger (Callum Turner), and drummer Reece (Joe Cole) — stumbles upon something truly gruesome. Ensnared in a deadly standoff with club owner/Gruppenführer Darcy (Patrick Stewart, relishing the chance to play a baddie), his steely eyed fixer (Macon Blair), and some very nasty white supremacists, it's clear that the band — joined by an unexpected ally with a Chelsea haircut (Imogen Poots) — will need their wits, and whatever weapons they can scrounge, in order to stay alive.

On the heels of his acclaimed revenge drama Blue Ruin (Festival '13), writer-director Jeremy Saulnier shifts gears for this nail-biter of a siege thriller. Spattered throughout with sharp dialogue, toggling between wry humour and sledgehammer bombast, Green Room elevates a deceptively simple cat-and-mouse premise into a terrifying and beautifully constructed odyssey.

Green Room is preceded by The Chickening, a short film by Nick denBoer and Davy Force. It's hard for a boy not to get excited when his dad gets a new job as Senior Chief Night Manager at Charbay's Chicken World and Restaurant Resort, the world's largest fast-food entertainment complex in North America. But things quickly get very, very clucked.