The Green Inferno Review Guide

The Green Inferno burns bright on the surface, but underneath, there’s nothing but ash.

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

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. The Green Inferno burns bright on the surface,

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. They are captured by the very tribe they

There is a fine line between paying homage to the gut-squelching cannibal subgenre of the 1970s and 80s (the infamous Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox ) and simply reviving its most grotesque, politically tone-deaf elements without adding any new insight. Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno —a title borrowed from the working name of Cannibal Holocaust —does not walk that line. It tramples it, falls face-first into the mud, and then expects applause for the mess it has made.

When the credits roll, you are left with nothing. No thematic resonance. No fear of the jungle. No newfound respect for cannibal movies. Just a greasy aftertaste and the sense that you’ve watched a wealthy director cosplay as a dangerous provocateur. The Green Inferno is for completists only. If you need to see every modern cannibal movie ever made, or if you have a high tolerance for screaming, disembowelment, and flat characters, you might find a midnight-movie charm in its excess. For everyone else, it’s a tedious, mean-spirited slog that mistakes cruelty for commentary.