ROOM – The Review

With ROOM, Director Lenny Abrahamson and screenwriter Emma Donoghue (who adapted her novel) dramatize the impossible situation of a child trapped for years in a room with his mother who’s continually raped there.  ROOM is a difficult but often tedious viewing experience, and while the effort is valiant, the movie doesn’t always hit its desired mark.

ROOM is the tale of 24-year-old Joy (Brie Larson), trapped in a soundproof garden shed for seven years after being abducted. The room has a hot plate and a sink, a toilet a television, and one skylight in the ceiling. Her captor (Sean Bridgers), known as ‘Old Nick’, brings her enough food to survive, disciplines her by cutting off the electricity, and tells her she doesn’t appreciate how good she has it. Oh, and he rapes her when he feels like it, which has resulted in a long-haired five-year old son named Jack (Jacob Tremblay) who has lived his entire life in ‘room’.

The first hour of ROOM feels by design claustrophobic, especially when Jack is throwing his screaming fits. I felt trapped in room with the kid and looked forward to getting out. Jack reacts to a world he has never experienced with gooey dialog like “The world’s always changing in hotness and lightness.” This is supposed to convey the insight of an innocent child but a little precious prose goes a long way and probably worked better on the written page. The cathartic escape scene at the halfway point is when the film really comes to life, and it’s a most emotional ten minutes. Jack, wrapped in a carpet to be discarded by Old Nick, who thinks he’s dead, finds himself in the back of a truck – in the real world for the first time – and the sequence is shot with odd angles and bright light to show Jack’s confused point of view. It’s too bad ROOM fails to maintain that level of interest once Joy and Jack are free and settle into her mother’s home where ROOM morphs back into a far less-interesting drama. The second half focuses on Joy and Jack struggling to come to terms with the world beyond the room by introducing bland domestic drama and more tedium. Joy argues with her mom (Joan Allen) while her dad (William H. Macy) won’t even look at young Jack. They bake cookies, there’s a suicide attempt, and some discussion about desire to return to Room. A half-baked television interview sequence with a crass reporter comes off like a spoof of tell-all programming handled better in GONE GIRL.

ROOM is solidly made but some flimsy plot contrivances are distracting. Is Old Nick, cunning enough to pull off this atrocity for seven years, really not going to bother to check whether Jack is still breathing before burying him? Why did Old Nick’s repeated rapes not result in more pregnancies? What happens to Old Nick and how are his crimes resolved? Brie Larson is good as Joy, but seems physically off. Wouldn’t someone trapped in a tiny room for seven years be more emaciated, more catatonic, more damaged? Larson seems sad and annoyed at her plight, but too robust. Young Jacob Tremblay, despite his tantrums and affected narration is mostly believable. ROOM is not a great movie but Emma Donoghue’s novel must have seemed like a challenging basis for a film, and it’s a minor miracle that this adaption works as well as it does.
3 of 5 Stars

ROOM opens in ST. Louis October 30th exclusively at Landmark’s The Tivoli Theater