[rating=9.00]
It never fails to grab headlines or touch our hearts or incite our imaginations with rage when news breaks about a kidnapping victim being freed from the confines of their prisons. We talk about the horror, the PTSD, and the brutality, but we never really think about it. Really, it’s almost too terrible to give it consideration, so we walk a bizarre line between hoping the victims can leave their past behind them enough to move forward and never letting ourselves think about what it is really is they’re moving on from. Nor do we, in the midst of the media blitz that inevitably surrounds these horrors when they’re brought to life, ever really think about what life must be like once their freedom has been regained. To us, freedom is the happy ending in a tale of terror. But surely that’s not reality. No, a person cannot live through an ordeal such as that, and immediately come out the other side all happy and full of roses. The truth is that freedom is often the first step, the next chapter in a horror story whose happy ending may dwell months or years into the future.
Here is the crux of Room, a story of a young woman (Brie Larson) who has been locked in a shed for the last seven years, and her five year old son Jack (Jacob Tremblay) who was fathered by her captor and knows of no world outside the shed. After being freed from their prison, the two must find a way to readjust to the outside world, a process which may, in fact, prove more difficult than their survival ever was.
Based on the novel by Emma Donoghue, who also wrote the screenplay, Room is a deeply affecting tragedy that finds beauty in the horrible and horror in the mundane. Told mostly through the eyes of Jack, we see a world that moves from comfortingly tiny to overwhelmingly huge all while helplessly watching his mother’s strength evaporate in the face of freedom. It’s a nuanced perspective from which to view these kinds of stories. Often held up as beacons of strength by the media and popular narrative, we fail to acknowledge the long road that face these women once the doors that hid them are kicked open. But where most movies would put the ending of its story, Room puts near the middle. One ordeal simply births another, and the light at the end of the tunnel is anything but a saving grace.
Larson has always been an actress whose skills never quite aligned with her choice of roles, though she quite often shined in the roles she took. In that way, Room can be viewed as a sort of coming out party—she pulls no punches and holds nothing back in her role as Ma, giving the role her absolute all in a stunning and shocking display of skill that should pay off come awards season. So, too, with her young co-star, whose performance transcends that of a child to become something positively magical, maintaining a fine line between heartwarmingly adorable and tragically heartbreaking.
It’s the interplay between the two that carries Room and makes it such a complex and involved narrative work. Both Larson and Tremblay hold the movie entirely on their shoulders, and their onscreen chemistry is almost baffling. How can a child and a woman in her 20s who isn’t his mother maintain such a complex, deep relationship? It’s enough to wonder if the two have kept up a friendship since the film wrapped. Tremblay appears to have bonded with Larson, and vice versa, and it’s not difficult to imagine a scenario where their closeness has translated into a real world relationship. Their relationship here is truly one of mother and son, with all of the love and fear that entails.
A lot of this is a credit to director Lenny Abrahamson (Frank). Through him, we see the world perfectly from Jack’s perspective. Their tiny shed, the only world Jack has known, is the entirety of the universe, and it becomes large in presence in Jack’s mind. He is largely unaware of the horror of their situation, behaving, instead, as a kid would be expected to behave. Smiling and laughing, the audience is left to interpret Ma’s terror, which is most often suggested rather than stated. Abrahamson proves a master of establishing the subtleties of mood and atmosphere with mise en scene and framing. As the narrative moves from “room” into the world, his shots convey the awe-inspiring, fear-inducing reality of the actual world with dizzying effect, making things as simple and everyday as the sky and backyards an experience that overwhelms.
Room is a remarkable achievement of narrative and cinema that screams for rewatches and analysis. It’s never an easy film to watch, but the ordeal is made palatable thanks to its knockout performances and the subtleties of its storytelling. It’s a film that celebrates the human art of survival without ever glossing over the impact of trauma, beautifully showcasing the ways in which we are all capable of enlarging our worlds and perspectives even in the face of overwhelmingly oppressive odds. In that way, its tragedy becomes uplifting, reminding us that it’s always possible to move on from our pasts, and to begin thriving despite the weight of our histories.
Room is now playing in theaters everwhere.
