Following on from last year’s Blue Ruin, Jeremy Saulnier returns with another grisly exercise in slow building tension. Green Room follows the misfortunes of small-fry punk band The Ain’t Rights as they chart there way on a tour of north-western America. Broke and weary they agree to a profitable gig out in the styx, but upon arrival discover the club is a focal point for local neo-nazis. After riling the crowd with an enthusiastic rendition of the Dead Kennedy’s ‘Nazi Punks Must Die’ and then accidentally witnessing a murder in the titular green room, the band find themselves in an increasingly perilous situation, as the local skinheads, let by the enigmatic Darcy (a game Patrick Stewart), attempt to dispose of all witnesses.

At its heart Green Room is a trashy, scuzzy take on the John Carpenter model; a single vulnerable location, a group of average joes out of their depth, a brooding, foreboding soundtrack and a vicious glee when it comes to blood letting. In this sense Green Room builds on the promise of Blue Ruin; dog bites to the throat, hands hacked to the bone, razor-slit torsos and gunshots to the head. The film takes a sadistic pleasure in dispensing with its victims; characters that you’ve developed a genuine affection for are disposed of in five seconds flat, their corpses unceremoniously ditched.

As entertainment it’s a tense, immaculately crafted thrill ride, so why is it a lesser film to Saulnier’s debut? The problem lies in its inefficient storytelling. Blue Ruin was a masterpiece of economical narrative and visual storytelling, despite it’s other flaws, Dwight’s backstory, his journey and his mission were all carefully moderated. For the first thirty minutes of Blue Ruin, every shot propelled the story onto the next, offering up continuous tidbits of information. It was precise, efficient and it showed instead of told. With Green Room, Saulnier is already on the back foot with having to contend with five separate protagonists and although I hope this takes nothing away from the smart, empathetic work of the ensemble cast, that initial lack of focus carries with it a lack of emotional connection, especially as some of the band members tend to blur into each other. Additionally Saulnier stuffs the narrative with irrelevant backstory. A film that can essentially be boiled down to punks vs Nazis should be able to soar via its low-brow, high-concept trashiness alone. Yet we are invited to engage with the relationship history of the murdered girl and the illegal dealings of the Nazi group, neither of which feel fully formed nor have any bearing on our enjoyment of the central premise. It never tips the film into tedium, its pace is too nibble for that, but it’s superfluous detail that undoubtedly muddies the water.

There’s been a recent resurgence in American independent filmmaking to readopt the cool, efficient and intelligent genre filmmaking of the 1970s and 80s and both Blue Ruin and Green Room demonstrate that Saulnier is riding the crest of that wave. Unlike Adam Wingard’s The Guest or David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, which although undeniably entertaining, feel almost too referential to their b-movie forefathers. Saulnier on the other hand has crafted a world that in some ways feels relevant to the world today, a cinema of cynicism, brutality with subtle flecks of social consciousness weaved throughout, that lacks the increasingly insufferable post-modernity of other genre cinema.