Can’t Get To The Theater To See ‘Green Room’? Watch ‘Blue Ruin’ Instead

If you’re in the mood for a fun, bloody time at the movies this weekend, you should definitely take a look at a movie like Green Room. A low-level punk band plays a gig deep in the heart of redneck country and ends up getting tangled in a nightmare scenario that they’ll be lucky to escape with their lives. All that, plus Patrick Stewart as a racist gang leader, drawling his way through his most against-type role to date. It’s fun, it’s scary, it’s violent as hell … but it was only in 30 theaters nationwide as of last weekend. It’s a corker, but you might have trouble getting to see it just yet.

Fear not! We have an alternate plan of action for you. In 2013, Jeremy Saulnier, director of Green Room, made his name in indie circles with out-of-nowhere success of his movie Blue Ruin, which as fate would have it, it available to rent or buy on Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube, and a bunch of other VOD outlets. Whereas Green Room is much more of an overtly violent horror movie, Blue Ruin presents as a revenge movie in the skin of a character study. But not in a gross “he wears someone else’s skin” kind of way.

Blue Ruin begins like one thing and becomes something else entirely. Dwight, scgraggly, beardy man living out of his car, gets told by the police that the man who murdered his parents is being released from prison. Which sets Dwight off on a journey home to claim his measure of revenge. There’s an expectation, at this point, that you’re going to watch this quest for vengeance play out over the course of 90 minutes. That’s not quite what happens. Or it is, but not at all in the ways you expect.

In the role of Dwight, Macon Blair (who also stars in Green Room) delivers a fantastic performance of unexpected complexity. There’s grief and damage there but also guilt and fear  and the kind of vulnerability we’re not at all accustomed to seeing in a revenge film. And if that’s not enough to sell you, might I interest you in a scene featuring Buzz from Home Alone?

Saulnier’s got a gift for taking B-movie premises and filtering them through this kind of minor-key reticence on the part of his characters. What if the kinds of suspense movies we’re used to seeing were populated by people who are entirely not equipped to be in them? What lengths would those people have to go to? Taken individually, Blue Ruin and Green Room are very good movies. Taken together, aside from being the possible beginnings of a spiritual trilogy if the third movie has “yellow” in the title, they herald Jeremy Saulnier as a director to watch.