Room

If a movie depicts a woman and her tod­dler son held cap­tive in a small, cramped room by a repug­nant male sex per­vert, it’s only nat­ur­al to expect some kind of ret­ri­bu­tion take place. In so often ful­fill­ing that desire, cin­e­ma pro­motes a creed of cycli­cal vio­lence. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

But it’s okay, because when the bad dude gets his inevitable come­up­pance, objec­tive jus­tice has been served and we can skip from the cin­e­ma, punch­ing the air and per­haps even believ­ing that real life offers such nat­ur­al fix­es. Lenny Abrahamson’s Room fol­lows this con­ven­tion, but in a sen­si­tive and clever way, one which doesn’t allow the view­er to vic­ar­i­ous­ly enjoy the pain being inflict­ed on a ​“bad” per­son by way of revenge.

The film is about how some peo­ple are too busy deal­ing with their own shit to be able to psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly jolt them­selves into a mind­set which has them bay­ing for blood. That’s not to say that the source of evil in the film isn’t pun­ished, it’s just that Abra­ham­son doesn’t give us the squalid sat­is­fac­tion of wit­ness­ing it. It’s also a film which explores the com­plex divid­ing lines between grief and hap­pi­ness. When awful tribu­la­tions come to their ecsta­t­ic end, we don’t just reset to zero and read­just to life as it was before the war.

Brie Larson’s Ma is remark­ably cheery and strong for a woman who has been snatched away from her cosy sub­ur­ban life to exist as a sex slave in a shed. Her son Jack (Jacob Trem­blay) is her only com­pan­ion in this hor­rif­ic ordeal. Old Nick (Sean Bridgers) is the dev­il with the key code to the big met­al door which cuts them off from the wider world, the wind, the trees, ani­mals, build­ings, every­thing. And while Ma and Jack have set­tled into a rou­tine of enforced domes­tic­i­ty, they secret­ly hatch schemes to free them­selves. Even though there are breath­less thriller ele­ments in their attempts to break out, it’s only late in the game that Room reveals that it is not a thriller, but a mov­ing fem­i­nist tract which explores ques­tions of what it means to be a moth­er, what it means to give love, and what it means to receive it.

The most heart­break­ing thing about Room is how Ma is forced to bring up her son in the belief that he will nev­er know the world out­side. He has no con­cept of soci­ety, tech­nol­o­gy, archi­tec­ture, and out of des­per­a­tion she has to cor­rupt his learn­ing curve so to damp­en his desire for escape. That she then has to care­ful­ly undo all of this nec­es­sary devel­op­men­tal med­dling is pos­si­bly the source of her sub­se­quent depression.

Per­haps the film’s most impres­sive feat, how­ev­er, is that it flips, back and forth, between the per­spec­tives of Ma and Jack. Abra­ham­son is not inter­est­ed in the gim­mick of pre­sent­ing Jack’s sub­jec­tive per­cep­tion of the world, but he does show Ma’s per­spec­tive of her son’s lim­it­ed, dis­tort­ed grasp of this strange sit­u­a­tion. Ma’s even­tu­al sense of grief isn’t fuelled by the vio­lent specifics of the ordeal, but the sense that her ​“father­less” son has been irrev­o­ca­bly cor­rupt­ed by what he has (and hasn’t) seen, or that she has some­how let him down.

It’s an incred­i­bly mov­ing and detailed work. By shun­ning melo­dra­ma to focus on phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al minu­ti­ae, it’s a film about the imper­cep­ti­ble strug­gles of get­ting through each dark day.