★★☆
Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room has the kind of premise that comes as a gift to filmmakers, so this film adaptation from Lenny Abrahamson (Frank) carries with it a lot of promise.
The story of a young woman, Joy (Brie Larson) and her five-year-old son Jack (Jacob Tremblay), who together break free from years of captivity in a suburban basement, has two rich strands to be mined from. On one hand, it aims to depict what the world looks like to someone experiencing it for the first time, and on the other, the bond between a mother and her son.
On the latter count, Room succeeds in large part to the work of Larson and Tremblay, with the latter giving the kind of naturalistic child performance that can be chalked up to deft, sensitive direction. Where the film is under-realised is in Ambrahamson’s visualisation of its central characters’ experiences, and a failure to find a cinematic language that correlates with Jack’s subjectivity. Occasionally, a Days Of Heaven-like voiceover will remind us that we’re seeing everything through his eyes, yet the film’s lynchpin moment involving an escape plan from the titular room (scored to a generically ‘soaring’ Explosions In The Sky crescendo) abandons his P.O.V. to milk the scene for full child-in-peril suspense.
When both Jack and Ma return to their suburban home and attempt to readjust to life, Abrahamson’s visual motif of staircases framing its characters like prison bars starts to become comical in its repetition. Apart from ham-fisted directorial choices like these, the film is comprised mostly of long stretches of visually neglibility, and a treacly music score that distracts from the action more than abetting it.
None of this makes Room an outright bad film (four Oscar nominations including Best Picture can’t be wrong… right?), and it’s largely watchable thanks to its actors and the strength of the material it’s based on. But there’s something about seeing a potentially extraordinary work settle for the bland, smooth satisfaction of a Lifetime movie that stings worse than watching something blatantly awful.
Roomis in cinemas now.
