Room (2015) Review
9/10
Jack turns five in a room eleven feet square. He says good morning to the wardrobe, the sink and the plant. His mother has been held there for seven years and he has never been outside it.
The 9 is for a film that solves an unfilmable problem twice. The first half has to make a captivity readable without becoming exploitation, and it does that by giving the point of view to a child who does not know he is captive. The second half has to earn a whole different film, and it does.
The point I withhold is a stretch in the last third where the film loses some tension once the plot is resolved and the subject becomes recovery. That is honest to the material and it is still the section where attention drifts.
The Child’s Point of View Is the Whole Solution
Donoghue’s novel is narrated by Jack and the film keeps it, in voiceover and more importantly in what the camera is allowed to see.
That decision does two things at once. It makes the material survivable, because Jack experiences Room as home and describes it with genuine affection, and it makes the horror worse, because the audience understands what he is describing and he does not.
Old Nick is barely in the film. When he visits, Jack is in the wardrobe counting, and the camera stays with Jack behind the slats. We hear a bed and a man’s voice and nothing else. The film declines to show us the thing it is about, which is both a moral choice and the correct dramatic one.
Everything Jack does not understand arrives through his mother’s face. Larson plays Joy managing a five-year-old while carrying seven years of it, and the performance is in the effort of the management. She is cheerful for him and the cheer costs visible work.
The rules of Room are the worldbuilding and they are all hers. Things on television are not real. There is no outside. Sunday is treat day. She has constructed an entire cosmology to keep a child from understanding where he lives, and the film lets us admire the invention before we register what it is for.
A narrator who misunderstands his own situation gives the reader two stories at once. Jack’s account is accurate and his interpretation is wrong, and the gap between them is where the horror lives.
This is also the most humane way to handle unbearable material. You are not softening it, you are relocating it into the reader, who assembles what the narrator cannot name.
The technique fails if the narrator is merely stupid. Jack is bright, curious and reasoning correctly from what he has been given, which is why the reader trusts his observations while rejecting his conclusions.
Escape at the Midpoint
Most films of this shape would end on the escape. This one puts it at the halfway mark and then asks a harder question, which is what happens next.
The escape sequence is the most tense thing in the film. Jack is rolled in a rug, has been coached on a plan he only partly understands, and has to unroll himself in the back of a moving truck and jump. He has never seen the sky.
The shot of him looking up is the pivot of the entire picture. Danny Cohen shoots it from Jack’s position, tilting, overexposed, too much of everything, and the film has spent an hour in an eleven-foot box to earn that assault of open space.
Then the second film starts. Joy comes home to parents who divorced during her captivity, to a media apparatus that wants an interview, and to a son who does not want to leave his grandmother’s bedroom because rooms are what he understands.
The escape also costs Jack something the film is careful about. He is asked to do the hardest thing in his life for a mother who has been telling him a version of the world that turns out to be false, and he has to trust her at the exact moment her authority collapses. He does it, and he is not the same afterward.
The Recovery Half Is the Braver One
The second half is about the fact that being rescued does not end anything, and it is unsentimental about how badly it goes.
Joy is angry at her mother, angry at an interviewer who asks whether she considered giving the baby up, and eventually not able to carry it. The film puts her in hospital and does not treat that as a failure of character.
Jack’s adjustment runs the opposite direction. He is five and adaptable, and the thing that breaks his mother is survivable for him, which is a genuinely uncomfortable observation the film makes without comment.
Joan Allen is quietly excellent as the grandmother, managing a daughter who has come back different and a grandson who is a stranger, and William H. Macy has one scene as the father who cannot look at the boy and then leaves the film, which says everything about him.
The haircut is the moment the second half turns. Jack has never cut his hair and believes his strength is in it, and he gives it to his mother when she needs it. It is the first thing he has ever had to offer anybody, and the film treats a child’s superstition with complete seriousness.
Resolving your plot at the midpoint forces you to find the real subject. The escape is the event. The aftermath is the story, and most films never get to it because the event is easier to structure.
If you do this, the second half needs its own engine. Here it is a question instead of a threat: can these two people live in a world that is not the room, and the answer is different for each of them.
Refuse the recovery arc. Joy gets worse before she gets anywhere, and the film’s honesty about that is why the ending lands as earned instead of administered.
Two Performances, One of Them Seven Years Old
Larson won Best Actress, along with the Golden Globe, BAFTA, SAG and Critics Choice, and the film took four Academy Award nominations including Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay.
Jacob Tremblay was seven during filming and carries roughly half the running time. Abrahamson worked with him extensively before the shoot, and Larson and Tremblay spent time together building the relationship before any camera turned over, which is visible in every scene they share.
What Tremblay does that most child performances do not is behave inconsistently in the way children do. He is delighted, then bored, then frightened, then delighted again inside a single scene, and none of it is played for cuteness.
His omission from the Academy’s supporting category was widely noted at the time and looks stranger every year. He is in more of the film than Larson is.
Lenny Abrahamson’s direction is invisible in the best sense. There is no showing off in the small space, no clever mirror work or virtuoso long take. The camera stays at Jack’s height and lets the room be a room, and the restraint is the reason the sky lands when it finally arrives.
A Small Film That Earned Its Reach
Thirteen million dollars, about thirty-five million worldwide, a co-production between Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States, premiered at Telluride in September 2015.
The room set was built to be dismantled and reassembled, and the crew shot inside it with walls removed only when unavoidable, which is why the space reads as consistently small. The audience learns its dimensions without being told them.
Donoghue adapting her own novel is the other structural advantage. She had already solved the point-of-view problem on the page and knew which of her own chapters were load-bearing, which is a rarer combination than it sounds.
The film’s commercial life depended entirely on the awards run, which is the standard fate of a subtitle-free adult drama with no stars at this budget. It worked, and the mechanism is worth noticing, because the same film without a Best Actress campaign disappears.
An author adapting their own work has one real advantage: they know which parts are structure and which are decoration. Most adaptations cut the wrong things because they cannot tell.
The corresponding risk is protecting material for sentimental reasons. Donoghue moved the escape and compressed the aftermath, which are both cuts an outside writer would have proposed and an attached author usually resists.
On constraint: an eleven-foot set is a gift. Every prop becomes a character because there are only nine of them, and the audience knows the geography completely by the twenty-minute mark.
Should you watch Room?
Yes, and be ready for it. This is a film about captivity that never once shows you the worst of it, narrated by a child who thinks he is describing a happy life, and the second half is braver than the first because it refuses to pretend that getting out is the same as being all right.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 3 of my film lists