Review - Room

Be warned, Room is a distressing watch. The story is so detestable and clearly despairing that at certain points of the film you won’t want it to continue. Yet within its constricted boundaries, this life-affirming drama directed by Lenny Abrahamson and scripted by Emma Donoghue, brings hope and warmth out of a dark, confined place.

Adapted from Emma Donoghue’s own Booker Prize nominated novel, Room tells the story of kidnapped mother (Brie Larson) who will do whatever it takes to protect her son (Jacob Tremblay) from her violent captor. Room is a startling moral story of motherhood, swaddled in a concurrent monstrous story, an agonizing story that portrays the strength of a mother’s affection and of a cherished son’s capability to find light in the darkness of adulthood.

Similar to other mother and child tales, Room is about two people who are yet to cut the cord. With Ma and her 5-year-old son Jack, the detachment of the two has been barred because of their imprisonment in a ten-square-foot shed. To Jack, this small space is his absolute world, where everyday furnishings; tables, sinks, rugs are the only things he knows of and everything foreign is completely abstruse. To Ma, room is her hell, a shed she has been locked in since her kidnap 7 years previous, where she has been raped and abused countless time and fathered Jack. It is tenable that what is envisioned past the walls of room is further nuanced, more telling and even more staggering than what befalls inside. It is the excellence of Lenny Abrahamson’s adaptation that makes us merge the two together, with Jack’s fascination and Ma’s repugnance emulsifying like two separate liquids, into a wrenched reality that helps Ma and Jack to amass a clutch on sanity.

In terms of performances, Brie Larson and young Jacob Tremblay are close to flawless, as the mother and son that the shuddering world of Room resolves around. Since appearing in the phenomenal Short Term 12 (2013), Brie Larson has been threatening to truly burst forth, and Room will most definitely be the film to make this happen. The rawness she brings is on the verge of unwatchable and the pain she channels is just too uncomfortable to sit with. Her co-star, nine year-old Jacob Tremblay brings one of the best child performances ever to grace the silver screen, which is entirely authentic in everything he does. Tremblay’s performance as Jack doesn’t just make life inside the room bearable for Ma; it also makes the film all the more bearable for us. His imperative child vitality, frailty and resilience, his cries of delirium and discontent, ventilate the room.

Now young child actors are only ever as good as their directors, and Abrahamson’s direction is marvellous. He doesn’t just have the intellect to put faith in his cast to show us the story from their perspective, but he also regularly finds new ways to view the room. The director and his crew have constructed a space that depending on camera angles bloats to a space that seems much bigger than the boundaries of room. Danny Cohen’s brilliant cinematography makes room seem as enormous to the audience as it does to young Jack. The close ups complicating the rooms dimensions whilst the use of staggered wide shots shrink it back down to size.

In the initial phases of the film, Stephen Rennick’s alluringly compassionate score attempts to enunciate the humane domesticity, rather than the piercing claustrophobia of Ma and Jack’s situation. A while later, Rennick cleverly gives way to maintained atmospheric chimes that extend a frightening insight in to our own unusual world, with This Will Destroy You’s The Mighty Rio Grande also being exploited to overwhelming effect throughout.

Room can measure heavy on your heart like a rock as it requisites the harrowing experiences of real life victims. It asks an excessive amount of the audience, drawing you farther into the shadows of the journey to find some faraway light. The way Abrahamson takes you to places you once couldn’t even dream of is a record of how well he has told this story, and just how well Donoghue has written it. If last years roguery Frank (2014) proposed that Abrahamson was a director to look out for, Room will make him a director to be adored.