Green Room

 It begins as a road movie: The Ain't Right's are on tour, living hand to mouth as they perform live shows throughout the pacific northwest, crashing on fan's couches, siphoning gas to make it to the next venue.

 Not the best way to do business, as they discover when a show falls through. Finances almost down to zero, they're faced with cancelling the tour, but the dipshit that had them come to town for nothing offers an option - play out in the boonies for a 'boots and braces' crowd - skinheads. What could possibly go wrong?

 Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier and cinematographer Sean Porter film this prologue with a beautiful naturalistic flair and a very firm handle on the day-to-day business of a tiny punk band trying to string some shows together. The band is Tiger (Callum Turner), Sam (Alia Shakwat), Pat (Anton Yelchin) and Reece (Joe Cole) - a really likeable bunch of kids even when they're (very believably) posturing about how legit they are. Their relatability is a great asset in a nasty horror movie like this.

 Once they make it to the venue things... they look all right, actually. Tense, but manageable. And their show goes well - despite the gang hilariously choosing to go with Nazi Punks Fuck Off as their opening number; "It's a cover" the lead mutters as bottles fly around him.

 They get paid and are on their way out when Pat realizes he left his phone behind on the green room - and when he gets there, there's a girl with a knife buried to the hilt in her skull. Fuck.

 So begins a standoff between the Ain't Right's and a rotating cast of heavies initially led by Gabe (Macon Blair). The film's scope narrows to just the green room initially, where the band is locked in with an armed, unfriendly brute and a fellow doomed witness (Imogen Poots), and slowly expands as the owner of the venue arrives and - Oh shit, it's Ben Kingsley Patrick Stewart! Ahem. Anyhow, he arrives to 'negotiate', and the band slowly starts realizing that their odds of survival are close to null even as they keep trying to reason with them.

 Things go even south-er almost immediately as the locals make their intentions clear with one incredibly fucked up instance of ultraviolence, and from there we follow both the punks as they try to find a way out and the skinheads as they make plans to kill them and dispose of the bodies in a way that won't get them in trouble.
 I've watched this a couple times over the years, and it always strikes me how complex the script actually is, and how well it communicates subtleties; besides the ripping horror/survival main plot, enough details are crammed in the margins to explain why that initial girl was murdered, we get a lot of character moments on both sides, funny bits of dialog and some horrifying ones as the venue management discuss the band's ultimate fate. It's a gem.

 And when things get going, they really get going. It's not a hugely gory movie, but the carnage still looms large thanks to some unusually terrifying brutality, which the camera lingers on unflinchingly. Survival of common people against hardened criminals is a common escapist movie trope, but this is no fantasy - good people get chopped up with little warning and extreme prejudice, and any reprieve is gained at horrible cost.

 The acting is great (most of the cast is British for some reason, not that you could tell), the music's excellent and the filmmaking is propulsive and even lyrical at multiple points, leading up to one very moving shot right near the end, followed by a pretty funny, silly gag. Damn near perfect little movie.