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’s 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 doesn’t know he’s captive. The second half has to justify 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’s honest to the material and it’s still the section where attention drifts. Room hit me harder than any film this quiet has a right to. What looks like a captivity picture turns out to be a love story between a mother and a five-year-old, told by the kid, and I think handing him the narration is the smartest call the adaptation makes.
The Child’s Point of View Is the Whole Solution
Jack narrates Donoghue’s novel and the film keeps his narration, 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 real affection, and it makes the horror worse, because the audience understands what he’s describing and he doesn’t.
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’s about. That’s both a moral choice and the correct dramatic one.
Everything Jack doesn’t 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’s cheerful for him and the cheer costs visible work.
The rules of Room are the worldbuilding and they’re all hers. Things on television aren’t real. There’s no outside. Sunday is treat day. She’s constructed an entire cosmology to keep a child from understanding where he lives, and the film lets us admire the invention before we tone what it’s 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 comes from.
This is also the most humane way to handle unbearable material. You’re not softening it, you’re relocating it into the reader, who assembles what the narrator can’t name.
The technique fails if the narrator is merely stupid. Jack is bright, curious and reasoning correctly from what he’s been given. That’s 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 the harder question of what happens next, and I think that decision is why Room stays with me when other captivity films fade. The escape sequence is the most tense thing in the film. Ma rolls Jack in a rug and has coached him on a plan he only partly understands, and he has to unroll himself in the back of a moving truck and jump. He’s 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 justify that assault of open space. That’s the shot I’d put on the poster. I held my breath through the truck sequence and let it out right there.
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 doesn’t 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’s 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’s not the same afterward.
The Recovery Half Is the Braver One
The second half shows that being rescued doesn’t end anything, and it’s 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 cope. The film puts her in hospital and doesn’t treat that as a failure of character.
Jack’s adjustment runs the opposite direction. He’s five and adaptable, and the thing that breaks his mother is survivable for him. That’s an uncomfortable observation the film makes without comment, and I admire it for refusing to soften it. Joan Allen is excellent as the grandmother, managing a daughter who has come back different and a grandson who’s a stranger, and William H. Macy has one scene as the father who can’t look at the boy and then leaves the film. That 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’s the first thing he’s 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 subject underneath. 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’s a question instead of a threat: can these two people live in a world that’s 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 feels deserved 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. That’s visible in every scene they share. What Tremblay does that most child performances don’t is behave inconsistently in the way children do. He’s 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’s in more of the film than Larson is. I’d have nominated him in a heartbeat, and I think his work is the reason the second half holds together at all.
Lenny Abrahamson’s direction is invisible in the best sense. There’s 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 With a Long 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. That’s 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’d already solved the point-of-view problem on the page and knew which of her own chapters were essential. That’s a rarer combination than it sounds.
The film’s commercial life depended entirely on the awards run. That’s 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 can’t tell. The corresponding risk is protecting material for sentimental reasons. Donoghue moved the escape and compressed the aftermath. They’re 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. I rate it a 9 because it tells a story about captivity without once showing you the worst of it, through a child who thinks he’s describing a happy life, and its second half is braver than the first because it refuses to pretend that getting out means being all right. The point it loses is that slack stretch once the plot’s resolved, where my attention wandered even while I respected what the film was doing.
