Film

Green Room

Name: Green Room
Genre: Horror, Crime, Thriller
Released: 2016
Cast: Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Patrick Stewart, Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole

A punk band stumbles onto a murder backstage at a neo-Nazi skinhead bar and spends the rest of the night barricaded in a green room while the crowd outside decides how to make them disappear. Jeremy Saulnier shoots it lean and merciless — no score to soften the dread, just improvised weapons, bad decisions, and Patrick Stewart's quietly terrifying club owner. Brutal, claustrophobic, and very good.

TMDb rating

6.7

If you liked this

Blue Ruin2014

Saulnier's previous film, and you can feel him working out the same muscles — a quiet, amateurish revenge spiral shot with the same patient, dread-soaked minimalism that made Green Room hurt so much.

But Much slower and sadder, with almost no dialogue — this is a character study in discomfort, not an ensemble siege.

Assault on Precinct 131976

The blueprint: a handful of strangers trapped in one building while an organised, faceless gang lays siege outside. Carpenter does with almost nothing what Saulnier does with grime and gore.

But Cheap 70s production values and a slower fuse — it earns its tension methodically rather than grabbing you by the throat.

You're Next2013

Another group cornered by people who badly underestimate them, with the same pleasure of watching prey turn predator using whatever's lying around the house.

But Broader and funnier than Green Room, with a wink to slasher tropes that undercuts the dread a little.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Key Largo1948no page yet

Same architecture decades earlier: strangers sealed into a single room with an unhurried, rational villain who negotiates death like paperwork — Edward G. Robinson is Darcy's ancestor.

A hurricane traps a hotel full of people with a gangster and his crew — hostages negotiating survival in one cramped space, tension built entirely on nerve and dialogue rather than gore.

But Black-and-white studio noir with no violence on screen; if you need the visceral punch of Green Room, this will feel genteel.

The Guest2014

A calm, charismatic figure whose stillness should worry you long before it does — think Stewart's Darcy rerouted into a synth-pop action thriller with real style.

But More stylish popcorn fun than punishing realism; it wants you grinning, not gripping the armrest.

Dog Soldiers2002

Same setup, almost beat for beat — outnumbered group barricaded in a remote building against something that wants them dead — with British soldier banter standing in for punk-band camaraderie.

But Swaps skinheads for werewolves and grim realism for creature-feature schlock and gallows humour.

[REC]2007

Trades the green room for an apartment building, but the panic, the confined spaces and the sense that every door leads somewhere worse feel like close cousins.

But Found-footage shaky-cam style is divisive, and the infection angle takes it somewhere more overtly supernatural.

Attack the Block2011

Same scrappy, working-class energy and improvised weaponry, this time against aliens instead of neo-Nazis — a tower block standing in for the green room.

But Sci-fi comedy beats soften the menace considerably; it's having more fun than Green Room ever allows itself.

Hush2016

Strip the ensemble away and you get pure trapped-prey tension — a deaf woman using her wits against a killer who thinks he already has the advantage.

But A one-woman show rather than a group dynamic, so you lose the camaraderie that gives Green Room its heart.

Cheap Thrills2013no page yet

Low-budget, escalating, morally ugly, and genuinely nasty by the end — a good option once you've decided you like watching decent people get cornered into terrible choices.

But It's pitch-black comedy underneath the violence, a tonal register far more jokey than Green Room's grim seriousness.

Skinhead Attitude2003no page yet

It's the true story sitting underneath Green Room's antagonists: how a subculture split, and how the ideology that traps the band in that room actually took shape.

A documentary tracing skinhead culture from its working-class, multiracial roots through to the racist far-right offshoot Green Room's villains belong to — the real history behind the fiction.

But Talking-heads and archive footage, not a thriller — go in for context and unease, not entertainment.

Cube1998

Swap skinheads for an inexplicable machine and you get the same core test: a small group of strangers, sealed in, forced to work out who can be trusted before the room kills them.

Strangers wake up trapped in a shifting, booby-trapped structure and have to cooperate, distrust each other and improvise their way out — same survival engine, rebuilt as science-fiction puzzle box.

But Cheap-looking effects and a colder, more abstract tone; it's about ideas and paranoia more than the sweaty, physical terror of Green Room.