Room (M). Director: Lenny Abrahamson. Starring: Brie Larson, Jacob Tremblay, Joan Allen, Sean Bridgers, William H. Macy, Tom McCamus. 117 minutes
Room is an unconventional thriller, and as such this review should be considered as containing minor spoilers. The film is based on Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue's excellent 2010 novel Room; Donoghue also wrote the screenplay, which shares the structure and many of the same dramatic beats as its source. Both find deep wells of beauty and affirmation amid decidedly bleak circumstances.
The story centres on the experiences of Joy (played in the film by Larson), who for seven years has been held prisoner in the souped-up garden shed of a suburban maniac; and her five-year-old son, Jack. It explores the elaborate and imaginative methods Joy has employed to nurture and educate her son, while at the same time protecting him from the dark reality of their existence.
The novel is remarkable in its use of language to create the inner voice of Jack, who narrates it. This often involves charming deconstructions of idiomatic English. Jack is awed by Joy's description of their physical resemblance: 'You are the dead spit of me.' 'Why I'm your dead spit?' Later he observes a gob of her toothpaste and saliva in the basin; it doesn't look anything like him.
At the same time, the image of Jack as a product of his mother's 'dead spit' is a potent metaphor for the biological connection they share. Of course Jack also shares this connection, at least, with his biological father, Joy's captor and rapist, 'Old Nick'. Firm lines are drawn then between nature and nurture: Joy insists Jack is hers alone; Old Nick (Bridgers) spawned but didn't raise him, and thus is not his 'father'.
As director, Abrahamson brings a stylised realism to the film that mimics the novel's capacity to transmit the bleakness of Joy's situation via the wonder-full gaze of Jack. Danny Cohen's handheld cinematography captures Joy's sense of confinement and Jack's understanding (fostered by Joy) of the shed, which he calls simply Room, as a place bursting with possibilities for recreation, rest and learning.
And then — and here's where things get spoilerish — there is a breathtaking first-act climax; and when the second act commences, Jack and Joy are Outside. Here, Jack faces the prospect of coming to terms with a world that, days earlier, he did not even know existed. Joy, too, must adjust to a