Film Reviews: ‘Room’
Film Reviews: ‘Room’
A two-hour drama about imprisonment, rape and interpersonal degradation based
on the crimes of the psychopathic Austrian criminal Josef Fritzl doesn’t
exactly sound like a recipe for a soul-stirring feel-good weepie. And yet,
lo and behold, via the genius of Lenny Abrahamson’s powerfully affecting Room,
that rare and transformative magic of cinema is very much upon us.
Tip:
bring a hanky. In fact, bring two.
Published at 12:07AM, January 15 2016
And what a beginning. Sheer, infectious enthusiasm from Jack’s initial narration – “Good morning, lamp! Good morning, desk! Good morning, walls!” he chirps, like a miniature Gordon MacRae from Oklahoma! about to launch into the first few bars of Oh, What a Beautiful Morning. It quickly becomes obvious, however, that Ma has shielded Jack from their brutal everyday reality, and that her greatest gift as a mother has been the facilitation of Jack’s super-fuelled imagination, and the creation of a one-room world where eggshells can become best friends, where bendy spoons have personalities and where people on the torture shed’s tiny television set are “flat and made of colours” and definitely not real. (“But you and me are real,” Jack says, softly, to Ma, and with such tenderness that you might just have to reach for the hanky right then and there, barely 15 minutes in.)
It is the tension between Jack’s perception of reality, Ma’s desire to hide him from it, and the pair’s ultimate need to escape from Old Nick’s increasingly deranged clutches (he loses his job, he has no money, he’ll probably kill them) that drives the movie and makes it such a compelling yet excruciating watch. Thankfully, though, in a cinematic era where art-house gore and Tarantino-eque torture porn remain the norm, Room clings to the perspective of a child and thus implies Ma’s rape every night, through shadowy glimpses and cruel thudding sounds, rather than showing it in exploitative detail.
The trailer alone nearly got me
Elsewhere — surprise bonus alert — there is an entire other film, waiting in the second half of Room, one populated by powerful character actors (Joan Allen) and scene-stealing cameos (William H Macy), but to say too much about it might ruin the difficult “pleasures” of the first half. Equally, it would be remiss not to note that everything that happens in Room, from opening to closing frames, is buttressed and defined by two of the year’s most accomplished performances. Larson deserves her best actress Golden Globe (and, hopefully, her Oscar), while Tremblay gives easily the best child performance since Ricky Schroder in 1979’s The Champ.
And then, finally, there’s the crying. Boy does this movie test the tear ducts. Arguably the best film about parenting that’s not ostensibly about parenting since Field of Dreams, Room will yank furiously at the heartstrings of anyone who is a parent, has been a parent or, even, you know, remembers being a child (ie everyone). And what it says, fundamentally, is that Ma and Jack’s room is parenting itself — a restrictive, shattering, life-altering place that leaves you forever changed, forever tired, and yet quietly humbled by daily expressions of limitless, depthless love. Goodnight, lamp. Lenny Abrahamson, 15, 118min
Room review – Brie Larson shines in a dark dungeon
Claustrophobic
horror gives way to muscle-clenching suspense in this film, and then to
something else, to a subtle and unguessable third act. It is Emma Donoghue’s screen adaptation of her 2010 novel Room; the director is Lenny Abrahamson, who brings his expertise in the pathology of avoidance and shame.
A young woman (Brie Larson) has been kidnapped and imprisoned for
years by a psychotic abuser; she and her young son Jack (Jacob Tremblay)
are forced to live in a tiny room with rudimentary cooker, lavatory and
washbasin, secured by a heavy steel door with an electronic key code.
Every evening, the man (Sean Bridgers) comes in with supplies, and to
rape the woman while Jack is curled up asleep in the wardrobe.This squalid cramped space is the only world Jack has ever known; he has evolved a magic/religious belief in how things arrive from the outside. He calls it “Room”, a word whose ironies gradually emerge, and for him it is a richly and reassuringly detailed universe, beyond which, through a skylight, he nonetheless glimpses a mysterious sky beyond. But, as Jack reaches his fifth birthday, the deceit and moment-by-moment nightmare of their situation become intolerable for his mother. She hatches a desperate plan to escape.
Larson gives a powerful performance, which has earned her a Golden Globe, with more prizes potentially on the way. She is very good at conveying the nauseous wretchedness of her life: the strain of concealing the truth from her son, or rather the strain of behaving as if the truth does not exist, since it would be impossible to explain. She preserves the macabre parody of his innocence in this satanic Eden, with no one else there except for an adult of whose love he is confident, and (periodically) another whose essential goodness as a provider he has no reason to doubt.
Tremblay is very good, too, with Jack’s basic childlike serenity: he appears mostly happy and certainly does not understand what is happening at night when he is in the wardrobe or what his actual relationship with this man is. Or rather, he seems no more subject to sadness and fear than other children on the outside. With a child’s ability to accept everything, Jack is content with “Room”, as his total world; he accepts this as we accept our world. I found myself thinking of Hamlet’s remark about Denmark being a prison: “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” You might find thoughts of The Truman Show flashing into your mind as Jack expresses his consent to everything he can see about him.
Room is of course inspired by two cases from Austria: Natascha Kampusch, who was abducted and imprisoned in 1998 at the age of 10, and the even more horrendous case of Elizabeth Fritzl, who in 2008 was revealed to have been kept captive and abused for 24 years in a basement of her father Josef’s house. It’s not a new subject in the cinema. Michael (2011) by the Austrian director Markus Schleinzer, showed some months in the life of a paedophile who keeps a child locked up in a dungeon. That’s a film which is more pitiless, more shocking and more despairing than Room, perhaps because it focuses more directly on the abuser.
This movie is set in the US and it does not have the same sort of brutal Euro-hardcore feel. Arguably, Schleinzer’s film is a truer representation of the subject. But that doesn’t mean Room is in some way evasive or emollient. Not at all. It keeps a clear, cold gaze on what is happening and shows that, just as this Room is a part of an unsuspected universe beyond, so the mother’s nightmarish existence is part of an extended, complex situation involving her mother (Joan Allen), her father (William H Macy) and her mother’s new boyfriend (Tom McCamus).
So are we all, adults and children, prisoners in rooms of various sizes and sorts? No: the film is not suggesting anything as glib. But it does show that the prisoner is burdened by the knowledge of an existence before imprisonment, a flawed, constrained existence that may in some sense have caused the current nightmare.
There are some plausibility issues in Room, but this is a disturbing and absorbing film, shrewdly acted, particularly by Larson. It lets the audience in; it does not just let the nightmare stun them into submission. You make a real emotional engagement.
Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
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Other critic's reviews
A
suspenseful and heartrending drama that finds perhaps the most extreme
possible metaphor for how time, regret and the end of childhood can make
unknowing captives of us all. Full review
While
it flickers with grace and imagination during its initial half, largely
because of Jack, it devolves into a dreary, platitudinous therapy movie
in its second, largely because of Ma. Full review
It's also the rare film to shine a light on the aftermath kidnapping survivors face once their ordeal is over. Full review
This
drama is as big as all outdoors in scope; poetic and profound in its
exploration of the senses; blessed with two transcendent performances by
Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay. Full review
Room
is astonishing: It transmutes a lurid, true-crime situation into a
fairy tale in which fairy tales are a source of survival. Full review
As wrenching as “Room” is, especially during its grim first hour, it contains an expansive sense of compassion and humanism. Full review
It’s hard to think of a movie adaptation of a book that feels truer and more loyal to its source than Room. Full review
On their own, each segment of Room is tense and emotional. But they’re even better placed back-to-back. Full review
OK, Room is a small movie, but its impact is enormous. Full review
Room
can be crass and crude and incredibly uncomfortable to see. Room is
also a thing of beauty—as inspiring a movie and, frankly, as Christian a
story as I've encountered in some time. Full review
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