Patrick Stewart in Green Room (A24)

You know you are in good hands within the first few minutes. There’s an economy of storytelling at play here that’s pretty astonishing, and it’s not that the film is stripped down, gritty and mean, though it is. It’s just that the filmmakers know exactly what to reveal and when. And they understand that even in a tension-filled standoff between punk rockers and neo-Nazis (which is practically a blueprint for a 1980’s Troma film) character reigns supreme.

It starts off when a gig for the band the Ain’t Rights is cancelled due to general ineptness, and the promoter, a sweet, geeky, Mohawked kid, feels bad and sets up a show at a club in the Oregon backwoods. The Ain’t Rights know the audience they will be playing for, as the aforementioned geeky kid warns them (the Swastika tattoos are also a giveaway). They figure they can barrel in, play, and get out with enough money to get themselves and their dinky van back home. No such luck. They witness something they shouldn’t have, get locked in the offstage green room, and the gruesome fun begins.

This is a rare horror film that actually treats the characters with respect. All the musicians are smart and resourceful as they try to work their way out of a desperate situation. Stuck in the green room and unsure of the exact intentions of their captors, they look for a way to escape. Meanwhile, the neo-Nazis, led by a terrifyingly calm and charismatic Darcy, played by Patrick Stewart, have clearly done this sort of thing before. Darcy is one those calm, composed villains whose sense of righteousness allows him to command loyal followers and whose method is usually to let his minions do the dirty work—he’s not a man to cross.

Kudos should go to the rest of the cast as well. Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole, and Callum Turner portray the Ain’t Rights, and they come across convincingly as a band that has probably known each other since grade school and have toured in a beat-up van for months on end. There’s a camaraderie that is unique to band dynamics, and they have it. A particular shout-out goes to Macon Blair, who runs the club as Stewart’s right-hand man, a guy who is efficient and smart but conflicted. He is caught between his desire to simply run his business and Darcy’s call to start a race war—Macon’s loyalty may actually lean toward the club. There is a quiet, hangdog intensity to his performance that makes you almost feel for him….almost.

Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin) reminds one of a young Steven Spielberg. Not the family-friendly Spielberg or the elder statesman with the social conscience but the mean, young, hungry Spielberg who had a taste for genre filmmaking and an unnerving ability to build tension. Saulnier is a master of pacing and tone, and Green Room is a white-knuckle thrill ride ensconced in a tightly claustrophobic setting. If not an outright classic, it is certainly a minor miracle in the age of slack, cheap, cookie-cutter genre knock-offs.