Green Room is a 2015 thriller written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, running 95 minutes. It stars Anton Yelchin as Pat, Imogen Poots as Amber, Alia Shawkat as Sam, Joe Cole as Reece and Callum Turner as Tiger, with Patrick Stewart as Darcy Banker. A punk band takes a gig at a remote clubhouse, sees something they should not have seen, and spends the rest of the film trying to survive the night.

I watched this one for a reason. Patrick Stewart died on Wednesday the twenty-eighth of October, at his home in Los Angeles. He was eighty-six. His family announced that he died following what they described as a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.

And out of a career spanning sixty years, across Shakespeare, Star Trek, the X-Men films and everything in between, this is the film I chose to go back to.

I did not know what I was expecting going into it, but it was not what I got.

This was an actual, real, gritty cinematic experience. The violence felt physical. The movements felt visceral when it came to certain situations. There is no style laid over the top of it, no choreography you can admire from a safe distance. It is clumsy and fast and awful in the way that real harm presumably is.

And that is entirely by design. Saulnier has gone on record stating that despite the volume of gore in this film, it is not sadistic, and that every single act of violence in it, with the exception of the one that sets the plot in motion, is committed for a reason. That principle is the reason the film works. Nothing here is violence as spectacle. It is violence as a series of terrible decisions made by frightened people in a confined space.

Everyone in this did a really good job. And in certain places it genuinely felt as though I were watching a dance, in terms of how the movement and the staging flowed through the scenes.

That instinct turns out to be shared. The quality critics return to most often with Green Room is its economy. Ninety-five minutes, almost no fat on it anywhere, and an intensity that very few films of any budget manage to sustain. Saulnier has said the entire project grew out of a desire to make a thriller set in a green room, an idea he described as an obsession.

Patrick Stewart. You are going to be missed.

In an interview published in July, only a few months before he died, Stewart was asked about retirement. He said that he could not imagine ever officially retiring, and that he would always and forever be an actor. At the time he said it, he was preparing to play Charles Xavier for a ninth time in Avengers: Doomsday, which will now stand as his final screen appearance.