FILM
ROOM
FILM
tions Ma can’t answer so
easily… and a change in
Old Nick’s situation means
staying in Room is becoming dangerous.
The escape is a lot to ask
of any five-year-old, let
alone one who has never
been out in the world. But
it works, and now Ma and
Jack must learn how to
integrate back into “normal” life - Jack adjusting
to a huge, chaotic and
overwhelming world beyond Room, and Ma picking up the threads of a life
interrupted in her teens
and dealing with the
rage, grief and trauma of
her time in captivity. The
film shows the challenges
both face, and how they
still ultimately manage
to find happiness and
a sense of gratitude for
what is.
F
or a film to take as its starting point the years-long forced confinement and rape of a
young woman and make it beautiful without disconnecting or becoming saccharine, is
a tall order. By some accounts, the likely Oscar nominee Room manages. But not everyone
agrees.
The premise of the story is that five-year-old Jack (Jacob Tremblay), born to his mother as
the result of ongoing rapes by her captor, has lived his entire life in a twelve-foot-by-twelvefoot room (a heavily reinforced and soundproofed garden shed) and has no idea that
anything beyond that room is real. Room is his world. Its citizens include Bed, TV, Lamp, Rug,
Wardrobe, Eggsnake (a long garland of eggshells on a string), Skylight and Meltedy Spoon;
and his mother. It is visited in the night by his mother’s captor, Old Nick (Sean Bridgers), while
Jack lies hidden in the wardrobe, pretending to sleep and silently counting the creaks of
the bed.
Joy Newsome (Brie Larson), Jack’s Ma, having exhausted her hopes of escape in the two
years before Jack was born, has chosen to let Jack believe at first that Room is all there is.
There is fun and laughter as they play together - washing their clothes in the tub while they
take a bath, adding more eggshells to Eggsnake as they prepare food - such that Jack never
imagines he’s missing out on anything. But Jack is getting old enough to start asking ques-
The film is based on the
book by the same name
by Irish author Emma
O’Donoghue. Despite the
fact that O’Donoghue
herself wrote the screenplay, the story feels very
different on screen from
what comes through the
book. Perhaps because
of Jacob Tremblay’s acting that infuses almost
everything he does with
a sense of wonder, Jack
in the film does not seem
as scarred as Jack in the
book. Jack of the book
is deeply obsessive, attached to routine, pantswetting terrified in the
escape, devastated to
learn he cannot return to
Room, physically clumsy as he learns to move
in spaces larger than
twelve-by-twelve, and insists on reclaiming some
of the items from Room
after the escape to give
him a sense of comfort
and familiarity. He does
learn to embrace life as it
is, bu