Three Films Make A Post: There's Only You And Your Dreams

Dad Savage (1998): The main selling point of Betsan Morris Evans’s thriller about greed and betrayal set in the British countryside is Patrick Stewart in one of his infrequent – and as usual in these cases clearly cherished - eccentric villain roles, though the rest of the cast with actors like Helen McCrory, Marc Warren and Kevin McKidd isn’t half bad either. The film’s trouble lies with a script that assumes you can make a simple story more dramatic by telling it in the most complicated, flash-back heavy manner available, where more time spent on actually fleshing out the characters would have done the film much more good. I also found myself not terribly fond of the film’s chamber piece aspirations, where everything that isn’t a flashback consists of the characters trapped with each other to enable loads of overtly dramatic ACTING of the very shouty variety.

Dangerous Lies (2020): Whereas this dreadful Netflix production by Michael Scott should be so lucky to actually have aspirations on things like theatricality. It’s a psychological thriller whose characters have all the depth of those of a daytime soap, played by the sort of young and pretty things not experienced enough to provide depth when the script doesn’t, shot in the bland style of a bad 90s TV movie and showing all the verve of a sleeping pill. It’s the kind of by the numbers filmmaking that really makes a boy think fondly of a less than successful film like Dad Savage because that one’s actually trying to do something interesting, whereas Dangerous Lies is just as generic and boring as its title.

La terre et le sang aka Earth and Blood (2020): Of course – and I know I am repeating myself here – originality isn’t everything. Case in point today is Julien Leclercq’s fine French Netflix production that goes through a lot of the typical motions of movies about middle-aged men violently protecting their daughters. But Leclercq knows where to add specificity to his clichés, understands about the importance of the telling detail to sparse characterisations, and has absolute control about the pacing of his film. The cast led by Sami Bouajila is pretty great too, applying care and intelligence where others would go through the motions.


The film’s also admirably brutal and ruthless, not in a gratuitous way, but one simply unwilling to be nice for nicety’s sake. This would make a rather instructive double bill with Netflix’s Braven, a pretty similar film that does everything wrong this one does right.

In short: Green Room (2015)

A small series of unfortunate events leads the members of a punk rock group (Anton Yelchin, Joe Cole, Alia Shawkat, Callum Turner and David W. Thompson) onto the stage of a rural Nazi skinhead bar. As if that weren’t bad enough, after the gig, they stumble onto the aftermath of a murder in the backroom. The Nazis, led by club owner Darcy (Patrick Stewart), operate on a clear no witnesses policy, so the band and not-really-a-member-of-the-Nazi-club-anymore Amber (Imogen Poots) soon barricade themselves in a room while a horde of murderous assholes (and their dogs) try to kill them.

Where Jeremy Saulnier’s last film, Blue Ruin, applied lessons learned from US arthouse indie cinema to the vengeance flick, Green Room does something similar to the classic siege movie, though this one is a bit more invested in fulfilling certain genre expectations than the earlier film. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, for Saulnier fulfils these expectations with calm and thought, telling the horrible misadventures of people way in over their heads through no fault of their own with an economy and efficiency one can’t help but imagine the patron saints (say Hawks and Carpenter) of the kind of genre movies this is modelled on would look upon approvingly.

There’s still quite a bit of US indie cinema tradition on display here, particularly in the acting approach, especially the line delivery. Now, I’ve seen a few reviews complaining about the dialogue being difficult to understand, but to my ears, that’s really just people either needing to get their ears checked or not able to cope with a somewhat more naturalistic acting style. The acting is actually pretty great, every Brit on screen (and there are quite a few of them) putting on their best US accents, and projecting appropriate levels of hysteria and fear while doing believably stupid shit, their characters not being action heroes and all. Patrick Stewart does some fine work for once playing a bad guy (and an American), avoiding scenery chewing for a more banal kind of evil, which seems the appropriate way to portray a neo Nazi.

Once Green Room gets going, events evolve quickly into some truly horrible violence, where a badly broken hand looks like a bloody mess, and death by dog seems as frightening and plain horrifying as it would be in reality. Particularly the first few deaths hit pretty hard, not because Saulnier is pulling out all the stops when it comes to gore – he’s certainly not afraid of showing the bloody consequences of violence but he’s not lingering on these things either – but because their staging feels believable, real, and final in a way not many directors even try to achieve. Despite not going in the direction of torture porn and despite following more of a thriller plot structure, Green Room does feel like a horror film for most of its running time, thanks to a lingering sense of dread hanging over much of it.

At the same time, the film is also a really tight, claustrophobic and inventive siege movie; just one that’s perfectly ready to hit characters and audience with an expertly timed low blow from time to time.