Room: Putting the Pieces Back Together

Room will leave you feeling absolutely wrecked. Written by Emma Donoghue (based on her novel of the same name) and directed by Lenny Abraham, it is an extraordinary movie and fully deserves to be seen by as many people as possible. But be aware that you will feel a lot of feelings.

The entire movie is told from the perspective of 5-year old Jack (Jacob Tremblay), a young boy who lives in "Room" with his 24-year old mother, Joy (Brie Larson). At first glance, they could be a very poor but loving family, making do in the cramped quarters they occupy. Until you slowly realize that they never leave this room. Because they are imprisoned there by "Old Nick" (Sean Bridgers), a man who kidnapped Joy when she was 17 and has kept her locked up in his garden shed for the past seven years. She became pregnant and gave birth to Jack in that shed, and Jack has no idea that anything exists outside of Room.

It is a horrific setting, a claustrophobic den of desperation, yet it is astonishing to watch how Joy maintains a sense of absurd normalcy for the sake of her son. She carefully supervises his brushing so his teeth won't rot like hers, and asks Old Nick to provide children's vitamins as part of their weekly "Sunday treat". She makes Jack stretch to keep fit and run "track," a heartbreaking exercise to run back and forth between the two walls of the shed that barely span the distance of her arms. And once he turns five, she finally teaches him that the things he has seen on their TV are not fake but real, things that exist outside of Room, and that she will need his help in order to escape.

If the first half of Room seems harrowing and distressing, what follows is even more tortuous. There is an escape attempt that might be the most tense thing I have had to witness in a movie theater. And subsequently, we learn that escaping from Room might have saved Joy and Jack from a monster, but it cannot save them from themselves. Initially it seems like Jack will have the greatest difficulty adjusting to the real world, a place he never knew existed until a few days ago. He doesn't even know how to climb up or down stairs, never having seen a staircase in all his young life. Yet, children are miraculously malleable, and as Jack learns to integrate into the outside world, we discover that Joy might be the one who will truly fall to pieces.

Larson delivers a haunting performance, able to portray Joy as a fiercely loving and devoted mother who is also a completely shattered human being. She captures every nuance of that character, the kindness, the rage, the pettiness, the sadness, the selfishness and the selflessness. The supporting cast of Joan Allen, Tom McCamus, and William H. Macy are also incredible, providing an insight into how you deal with the realization that the girl you gave up for dead has really been alive in such horrific circumstances all along. And Tremblay is magnificent, looking through this world with a wide-eyed naïveté and serving as the only bearable audience surrogate in this gruesome tale. If the story was told from Joy's perspective, I would have had to walk out of the theater, but getting the story through Jack's eyes protects you from the more horrific events that transpire just outside the realm of his 5-year old comprehension.

The score by Stephen Rennicks is particularly moving, but not as much as the careful use of silence, or the sounds of Jack learning that the outside world is composed of so many more sounds, colors, lights, and textures than what he got to experience in Room. This movie is also cunningly scripted and edited, always bringing you to the brink of horror and then pivoting to some quick moment of relief to give you a chance to collect yourself and carry on with the story. And the production design by Ethan Tobman is rather incredible. For the first half of the movie, when you are in Room all the time, it seems cramped, but Jack has plenty to keep him occupied. It is only when they escape and you see what the shed they lived in for seven years looks like from the outside that you realize the full extent of their imprisonment.

It seems wrong to say that Room is a beautiful film when it tells such an ugly story. But it is truly wondrous, a cinematic masterpiece that draws you in and compels you to stay invested in its characters. It is a wise psychological study, showcasing how the human spirit can survive in such appalling conditions, and then crumble under seemingly innocuous ones. And finally, it is a love story, of a mother and son who are each other's salvation, and who can survive anything as long as they have each other.