‘Green Room’ Teaser: Patrick Stewart Is a Persuasive Skinhead

It’s been a rough week, but A24's teaser trailer for Green Room should perk you right up — and I say should because you need to get pumped about Jeremy Saulnier’s masterfully tense follow-up to Blue Ruin immediately. After playing on the festival circuit for a bit in 2015, Green Room is primed to become one of 2016's best films, and this teaser trailer aptly offers just a tiny taste of what’s in store.

Patrick Stewart stars in Green Room as the leader of a pack of modern skinheads who trap an indie punk band in — where else — the green room at their dingy club after the musicians unwittingly see something they shouldn’t. Things escalate rather quickly from there as the group tries to navigate their way out of a building surrounded by Nazi-loving jerks with weapons. The teaser above combines brief flashes of footage from elsewhere in the film with a short clip of Stewart calmly and eloquently trying to negotiate with the kids inside. If you think that’s intense, just wait until you see the rest of it.

Here’s the longer description from A24:

Green Room is a brilliantly crafted and wickedly fun horror-thriller starring Patrick Stewart as a diabolical club owner who squares off against an unsuspecting but resilient young punk band.
Down on their luck punk rockers The Ain’t Rights are finishing up a long and unsuccessful tour, and are about to call it quits when they get an unexpected booking at an isolated, run-down club deep in the backwoods of Oregon. What seems merely to be a third-rate gig escalates into something much more sinister when they witness an act of violence backstage that they weren’t meant to see. Now trapped backstage, they must face off against the club’s depraved owner, Darcy Banker (Stewart), a man who will do anything to protect the secrets of his nefarious enterprise. But while Darcy and his henchmen think the band will be easy to get rid of, The Ain’t Rights prove themselves much more cunning and capable than anyone expected, turning the tables on their unsuspecting captors and setting the stage for the ultimate life-or-death showdown.
Intense, emotional, and ingeniously twisted, Green Room is genre filmmaking at its best and most original. Saulnier continues to build his reputation as one of the most exciting and distinctive directors working today, with a movie that’s completely different from his previous, highly acclaimed Blue Ruin, but which is just as risk-taking and even more full of twists. The entire cast deliver first-rate performances, but Patrick Stewart gives a transformative and brilliantly devious turn as Darcy—elegant yet lethal, droll yet terrifying, Stewart makes the film simply unforgettable.

Also starring Alia Shawkat, Anton Yelchin and Imogen Poots (and her incredible hair), Green Room was directed by Jeremy Saulnier, whose previous and equally excellent thriller Blue Ruin is currently available to stream on Netflix, if you’d like an idea of what’s in store here (and you do).

Green Room hits select theaters on April 1 before expanding nationwide on April 15.