Patrick Stewart has a blast playing against type as a soft-spoken white supremacist holding a punk rock band as his temporary prisoners in Jeremy Saulnier’s nicely crafted, low-budget comedy-thriller.
The struggling band, the Ain’t Rights, have unwisely accepted a fill-in gig at Stewart’s concert venue in the Oregon wilderness, and compounded their mistake by performing the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks F - - k Off’’ to an unappreciative audience while surrounded by Confederate flags. The unnerved musicians then accidentally become witnesses to a murder while retrieving a cellphone from the venue’s squalid green room.
Saulnier gets lots of laughs and builds plenty of suspense in this effective (if gory) little tongue-in-cheek sleeper. He’s abetted by solid performances from Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots and Alia Shawkat as the musicians whom Stewart’s minions are trying to methodically eliminate to cover up the crime.