On paper, this is a deliciously dark satire of "slacktivism" and white savior complexes. In practice, The Green Inferno is too busy slinging entrails to make a coherent point. To Roth’s credit, the practical effects are outstanding. The gore is visceral, sticky, and brilliantly executed. One early scene involving a quadriplegic character and a colony of ravenous ants is genuinely hard to watch. Another sequence—a full-body dismemberment accompanied by tribal chanting—has the queasy, hypnotic rhythm of a nightmare. For horror fans who value prosthetic artistry, there are moments of grotesque beauty here.
The plot follows a naive group of New York college activists led by the idealistic Justine (Lorenza Izzo). After witnessing the eviction of an indigenous village for a logging conglomerate, they hijack a plane to the Peruvian Amazon to chain themselves to bulldozers and stage a "non-violent protest." Their mission succeeds, briefly, until their return flight crashes deep in the jungle. They are captured by the very tribe they were trying to save—a tribe that, it turns out, practices ritualistic dismemberment and cannibalism. the green inferno review
The cinematography, too, captures the oppressive humidity and alien beauty of the jungle. Roth knows how to frame a landscape to make it feel like a cage. The fatal flaw of The Green Inferno is its staggering lack of self-awareness. Roth attempts to critique activist naivete, but his script is just as naive. The indigenous tribe is portrayed as a monolithic, screeching, one-dimensional threat—exactly the kind of "noble savage turned savage brute" trope that the genre should have retired forty years ago. On paper, this is a deliciously dark satire
The Green Inferno burns bright on the surface, but underneath, there’s nothing but ash. The gore is visceral, sticky, and brilliantly executed
Unlike Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust —which was undeniably racist and exploitative but at least contained a meta-critique of media sensationalism—Roth offers nothing. He gives the tribe no language, no personality, no motive beyond ritualistic hunger. They are simply obstacles with machetes. For a film ostensibly about Western arrogance, it is ironically the most arrogant kind of filmmaking: using a real culture as a wallpaper of terror without a shred of anthropological curiosity.