Jeremy Saulnier

Rebel Ridge

01/01/25

Netflix

Rebel Ridge wrong-foots me. Thanks to the title and blurb, I am anticipating a standard vigilante-revenge flick, but writer-director Jeremy Saulnier has created something far more interesting: a horrifyingly credible tale of police corruption and the suffering it creates.

When ex-Marine Terry (Aaron Pierre) cycles into Shelby Springs with a backpack full of cash, local cops Marston and Lann (David Denman and Emory Cohen) spy an opportunity to simultaneously throw their weight around, impress their Chief (Don Johnson) and boost their small town’s coffers. The image is all too familiar: a couple of thuggish white officers initiating a spurious stop and search and threatening an innocent Black man’s life. Only this time they’ve chosen the wrong guy.

Because Terry isn’t just the kind of person who serves as a role model – strong and self-assured, calm and intelligent, driven by a strong sense of right and wrong – he’s also a martial arts expert. He doesn’t want vengeance but he does want his hard-earned money back so that he can bail his hapless cousin out of jail. However, there’s something rotten at the heart of Shelby Springs, and local court clerk Summer (AnnaSophia Robb) needs his help to root it out…

Despite its premise, Rebel Ridge isn’t a very violent film. In fact, Terry actively avoids physical conflict, using his combat skills only when absolutely necessary. Instead, the focus is on the insidious damage caused by a legal system more focused on protecting itself than the public it’s supposed to serve – an exposé of the way that self-interest trumps morality, leaving carnage in its wake.

David Gallego’s cinematography evokes the Wild West, underscoring the sense that Shelby Springs is a tyrannous and untamed place. Meanwhile, Terry is reminiscent of the ‘good cowboy’, the quiet hero who rides into town and restores order. Pierre is perfectly cast in this role, exuding dignity and strength as well as real emotional depth. When it comes, the final battle feels well and truly earned.

A clever hybrid of action movie and social commentary, Rebel Ridge gets 2025’s film viewing off to a flying start.

4 stars

Susan Singfield

Green Room

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13/05/16

Jeremy Saulnier’s previous film, the low budget revenge drama Blue Ruin, ticked enough boxes to make him a director to watch. Green Room is a rock-horror vehicle that cranks everything up to eleven, and features the kind of visceral carnage that’s not for the faint-hearted or the weak-stomached.

Third division rock band the This Ain’t Rights are gigging their way around the Pacific North West of America, getting from place to place by siphoning petrol from other vehicles and playing the kind of dives that bring them around six dollars a piece. After a particularly bad night, an embarrassed promoter fixes them up with a gig at his cousin’s place and warns them that the audience will be ‘an unusual crowd’ – by which he means that they are a bunch of shave-headed, Neo Nazi supremacists led by Darcy (Patrick Stewart in an uncharacteristically nasty role, featuring an occasionally wonky American accent).

After an unpromising start, (the band kick off the gig with the Dead Kennedy’s classic – the one that dismisses Nazis in an fairly uncompromising manner) but after that, the band go down quite well and they are just congratulating themselves on being paid a decent fee for a change when they discover the body of a young woman with a knife. Unfortunately for her, it’s stuck in the side of her head. What’s more, the management seem very reluctant to let the band leave and before they know it, they find themselves holed up in the titular green room, wondering if they are going to escape with their lives.

In tone, the film is closer to some of the body shock films of the 70s – as individuals are hacked, bludgeoned and shotgunned to death, the tension begins to wrack up to almost unbearable levels. Anton Yelchin as bassist Pat is the nearest we get to a lead role here and Imogen Poots puts in a decent turn as Amber, a girl who is unlucky enough to have both the haircut from hell, and the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Saulnier’s muse, Macon Blair, has a small but interesting role as Darcy’s right hand man.

Everything builds to a ferocious crescendo, and it’s clear fairly early into the proceedings that  this isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of haemoglobin. As a former band member myself, it recalled some of the worst gigs I ever played at, but thankfully, things never got quite as bad as they do here.

Watch this only if you can tolerate scenes of excessive violence. Things get very bloody.

4 stars

Philip Caveney