By Chadwick Webb

Sir Patrick Stewart has been an iconic figure in the entertainment industry since before I was born. Despite not knowing too much about Star Trek for a majority of my lifetime thus far, I’ve been aware of Stewart because he played Professor Xavier in the X-Men franchise. Even though he was a great, iconic franchise actor, he sometimes ventured out of his comfort zone before his tragic passing in October 2026. One of those films, in which he gave a notable, head-turning performance, was in Green Room (2015) from writer/director Jeremy Saulnier.

After Green Room came out, Saulnier was on my radar. Then I fell in love with the movie he released prior to Green Room called Blue Ruin (2013). Now, after Rebel Ridge (2024) floored me, Saulnier is one of my favorite directors. When you think about it, Green Room came out at a very interesting time. 2015 was the year Donald Trump announced he was running for president before the decade of Trump would begin. With this new, looming political environment at the time, the atmosphere of white supremacy started to warm up.

Green Room starred Anton Yelchin as Pat the bassist, Imogen Poots as Amber, and, of course, Sir Patrick Stewart as the skinhead leader Darcy Banker. As Captain Picard, Stewart displayed a hard, disciplined exterior, but also showed deeply intellectual, moral, and passionate leadership. As a leader of a different kind in Green Room, Banker was the complete antithesis to Picard as somebody who views everyone and everything as a financial transaction. Picard cared deeply about life and the people who lived it, but Banker saw people as disposable. This contrast is why Stewart was one of the all-time greats.

Green Room is about a traveling punk band called the Ain’t Rights who take a gig at a Neo-Nazi skinhead bar, but find themselves trapped in the bar’s green room after finding the body of a recently murdered woman. It’s a very tight, claustrophobic horror/thriller that has the potential to make the viewer feel very uncomfortable. After all, this green room mirrors the world we would eventually come to inhabit. A bar that’s run by grifting people that represent a sinister, hateful ideology – does that sound familiar? While they may or may not fully believe in the cause their uniform might suggest, it’s definitely a disguise used to profit off of a lack of concern for others.

Once a popular actor himself before he tragically passed at the extremely young age of 27, Yelchin plays the final member of his band along with the final girl, Amber (Poots), who was the friend of the first victim. Yelchin and Poots are amazing in this. Having a punk band be the foil for the skinhead drug operation is brilliant because it shows that both groups in the movie exist as counterculture – determined to challenge the status quo and preach chaos to an extent. However, culture can take many forms, but let’s be clear. The culture that wins in the end is the one that sings “Nazi punks fuck off.“ Love and support for human rights always wins out. Saulnier’s genius was to package this messaging in such a way to make us feel the pressure and danger that people will feel in the world at large years later. We feel squeezed, just like the characters in Green Room and just like those characters, we fought back.

🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 1/2 stars