As a reader, it’s always hard to fall into a movie when you’ve read the book. A great example this year is The Martian, and those who’ve read the book can understand the pain felt when watching the film on the big screen. Ridley Scott’s vision, while keeping Andy Weir’s optimism, waters down the most important key element of the book: the survival. Emma Donoghue’s book Room is also one about survival, but it’s also one about a very young boy coming-of-age and discovering the world. It’s a movie about rebirth and discovery, and it’s all told from the perspective of a five-year-old boy who has lived in a box all of his young life. Lenny Abrahamson understood that, and his passion for the literature helped him create a not only faithful adaptation a reader can completely dive into, but one they can relive again like it’s the first time.
Room is about Jack (Jacob Tremblay), a young boy who has grown up in “Room,” a shed in the mysterious Old Nick’s (Sean Bridgers) backyard. Except Jack doesn’t know that. To Jack, Room is all he knows. That’s of course until Ma (Brie Larson) decides they need to escape, and Jack’s the only one who can manage to save them from their living hell. It’s an uphill battle for Jack though, because believing in a world beyond Room is already difficult enough to comprehend, let alone executing a plan to escape once he leaves his solitude.
Abrahamson structures the movie in two parts, exactly like Donoghue’s book: before and after Room. In the first part we really feel Room’s claustrophobia, and Abrahamson makes it believable for an audience to think like Jack, that there’s is no world outside Room. How could there be? The story, without overuse of voice over, is essentially from Jack’s point of view, and not the mother’s. Room is entirely carried by Jacob Tremblay, who is truly a remarkable discovery. He never overacts as children tend to do, and his relationship with Brie’s character of Ma is truly astounding, as they both genuinely feel like one when they’re together, and it’s even worse when they’re apart.
Which brings us to the escape. Normally, this kind of climactic moment would occur at the very end of the film during the third act, but it happens exactly in the middle of the second act after Ma decides it’s time to leave Room after Old Nick shuts down the power for a few days. The escape is heart palpitating, an allusion to one of the stories Jack’s Ma tells him to go to sleep some nights, The Count of Monte Cristo. As Old Nick carries Jack, presumably dead from his point of view, out to the truck the tension is at an all-time high. Except that’s not the only thing – the space is suddenly there. The film is no longer tight and intimate; it’s vast, bright, and beautiful in its dullness. Because you see, Jack escapes in the dead of the winter, at a time where it’s cold, grey, and damp, but it’s still not the confined space of Room. It’s open and Jack and his Ma are free.
Except perhaps the uninviting atmosphere of the frigid winter was purposeful. Jack’s hesitant to fall in love with what his Ma calls “The World.” There are so many new people, food from TV, and something called germs that force him to wear a surgical mask until he can adapt. Everything’s cold. Even Ma feels more distant, and it’s hard to understand why for a boy so young. But the audience understands, and through Jack’s eyes we’re watching a victim of rape recoil and give in to her suffering after seven years of wretched abuse.
What makes Room such a phenomenal, such an exquisitely tragic film is that it’s brave. Abrahamson doesn’t shy away from telling the story through Jack’s point of view, just as he doesn’t shy away from telling a story about a woman full of regret and shame. The movie also never doubts Ma’s love for Jack, which is possibly the most beautiful sentiment of the story. For Ma, Jack was her savior. He was her beacon of light in the darkness of the patriarchal and demeaning space of Room. Room’s about loving the world in all its simplicity, and by the end of the film you will be itching to go out and appreciate its unyielding and subtle beauty.
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