Alia Shawkat, Anton Yelchin, and Callum Turner (Scott Patrick Green/A24)

Violence is a dirty business. Apparently, so is music. In his new horror-thriller Green Room, writer-director Jeremy Saulnier immerses us in the dark underbelly of a Pacific Northwest punk scene whose denizens don’t leave their anger on stage. The movie’s bad guys are menacing, but with a strangely domestic angle: they’re just trying to clean up a big mess.

Pat (Anton Yelchin) and his bandmates in the Ain’t Rights wake up in the middle of a cornfield somewhere in Oregon, their van having plowed through landscape that looks like an overcast day on the set of The Sound of Music. The Arlington, Virginia punk group is at the end of a cross-country tour that has barely broken even, and after a desperate gig in a Mexican restaurant they agree to take a more promising show just outside Portland. When the band suddenly realizes they’re playing to an audience of white supremacists, they make the unwise decision to open their set with a certain Dead Kennedys cover. This sets in motion a bloody mess that is effectively Die Hard in a Skinhead Club.

The Alexandria-born Saulnier recently told a preview audience that he didn’t like to give characters traumatic backstories to explain their behavior; he thankfully avoids exposition, throwing the viewer among strangers and letting you watch how their behavior unfolds. This was one of the strengths of Saulnier’s 2013 breakthrough Blue Ruin, but that film had the benefit of stronger character development, especially for actor Macon Blair (also an Alexandria native), a Saulnier regular whose nice-guy looks limit the kinds of roles he can play.

In Green Room, Blair plays Gabe, a fairly benign neo-Nazi. In a scene that departs from the usual genre tropes, we see him in an apron and work gloves, diligently cleaning up the carnage that has ensued. The movie’s ostensible villain, club owner Darcy Banker (Patrick Stewart, who takes command of his supporting role) is a cleanup guy too, running damage control after an unfortunate incident at his club. It’s an intriguing metaphor for the ethnic and genre purity that inspires this particular scene.

Pat (who wears a Minor Threat t-shirt) and his band spend much of the film trapped in the club’s green room, their youthful angst replaced by something much more urgent and screamworthy. Saulnier took the film’s premise from his own experiences in punk bands, run through the filter of atmospheric thrillers like Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, an influence he freely admits. If its characters aren’t as well developed as those of Blue Ruin, the film gains a surprisingly sweet texture from an unexpected source: a pair of pit bulls trained to attack the visiting band. The dogs take us where horror movies dare to tread. Darkly comic and even touching at times, Green Room is a solid horror movie that colors outside the genre lines.

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Green Room
Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier.
With Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Patrick Stewart, Macob Blair
Rated R for strong brutal graphic violence, gory images, language and some drug content
94 minutes
Opens today at Landmark Atlantic Plumbing, Angelika Mosaic and ArcLight Bethesda.