*****
A BOY wakes up on his fifth birthday. Wild with excitement, he jumps out of bed and dances around the room, saying good morning to each object he sees: ‘Good morning lamp, good morning sink.’ After a while his drowsy mother begins to stir. He’s in for a treat today, she tells him: they’re going to bake a cake. With great concentration he breaks the eggs, taking care not to let the yoke spill over the side of the bowl. He even helps with the washing up. At last the cake is ready. There’s just one thing missing: the candles. ‘You can’t have a birthday cake without candles’, says the boy. But they don’t have any candles, explains his mother, suddenly impatient. ‘He’ didn’t buy any.
Room is a difficult film to watch, and it’s not much easier to talk about
Watching this, the opening scene of Room, we already know that something is wrong. Mother and son look normal enough; in fact they look as if they’re living out a domestic idyll. But they’re sleeping, cooking, eating and washing in a single chamber – a single chamber with no windows, just a skylight high up in the ceiling. The reason, of course, is that they’re prisoners in their own makeshift home, locked up behind a steel door for twenty-four hours a day. ‘He’ is their captor, the nameless man who appears at night with a small bag of supplies and undresses in view of the wardrobe where the boy sleeps. The mother, Joy (Brie Larson), has been there seven years. The boy, Jack (Jacob Tremblay), was born there. His birthday is also the anniversary of his incarceration.
Room is a difficult film to watch, and it’s not much easier to talk about. It has an unsettling plausibleness that owes little to our knowledge of similar cases in real-life, and there is an intensity to its dramatic irony – to the way it shifts between the make-believe world of mother and son and the grim reality beneath – that makes you feel continuously on edge. There has been a craze in recent years for films where people are kidnapped and tortured to death by psychopaths wielding scalpels, machetes and circular saws. These modern-day grands-guignols have nothing on Room. The nameless man – referred to as ‘Old Nick’ – is monstrous enough in his beard and glasses, chiding Joy for putting on weight and irritably reminding her that he’s the one who pays the bills. The only thing more frightening than someone who prefers nightmare to normality is someone who can’t tell the difference.
And then, about an hour into the film, Joy and Jack escape. At this point, Room becomes something else altogether – several things, in fact. It becomes a survivor story, a story about travelling to a new world, a family drama. For a few minutes it even threatens to turn into a media satire. This is of course a welcome transformation; after the oppressive atmosphere of the first act it’s a relief to see mother and son transported to a safe, loving new home. But this home has its own challenges. Jack, who until recently was unaware of the existence of other human beings, must learn how to be around people. Joy must readjust to a world where she is not defined solely by the role of protector. Suffice it to say, these are not easy transitions to make, and on the whole Room does a good job of dramatising the difficulty (It’s striking how, for a while after the escape, every man who appears on screen registers as vaguely threatening.)
Unfortunately, there just isn’t time to explore the new situation in the depth it deserves. The second half of the film jumps forwards unpredictably, showing us isolated moments in the process of recovery. And while the sensitive writing and strong performances keep things from becoming too formulaic, there is an unavoidable loss of intensity. In a rather abrupt finale – all snow fall and string sections – Room veers close to made-for-TV territory. Even Jack’s precocious voice-over, hauntingly innocent at the opening of the film, begins to seem cloying. ‘There are so many things out here,’ he says, winsomely. Too many to fit into an hour, that’s for sure.
