Copernicus saw ROOM at TIFF and thinks it is one of the year's best films

 

ROOM might well have been my favorite film from this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.  I wasn’t alone.  It won the Grolsch people’s choice award for 2015.  Come awards season, it ought to get nominated all over the place.

 

The subject matter isn’t easy.  The story is told from the point of view of a five year old kid, Jack, who has been imprisoned in a tiny room with his mother since he was born.  He’s the product of his captor raping his mother, Joy Newsome, who was kidnapped as a teenager, and has been there for 7 years.  This isn’t a true story — it is based on an award-winning and bestselling book by Emma Donoghue.  However, she was inspired to write the book after hearing about the Fritzl case, which has some horrifying similarities.

 

The film makes bold choices — for the first half, we never leave the room where Jack and Joy are imprisoned.  As a result, we feel the claustrophobia of the main characters, and the all-encompassing desire to freedom.  While this could easily result in all-out terror, the metaphorical darkness is counterbalanced by spending so much time with 5-year old Jack.  Jack has never known life outside what he calls “room,” but in many ways he’s just a normal kid.  The difference is that in his cosmology, “room” is the only reality, and TV is the realm of fantasy.  He’s never seen a tree or grass or a dog, or other people outside of his mother and his captor, “Old Nick,” so he thinks they are imaginary. 

 

Jack and his mother do get out eventually.  Imagine being exposed to the entire world for the first time after first only seeing it on TV.  Jack doesn’t really know the difference between, say superheroes and normal people, or between cartoons and reality.  He doesn’t even really know what doors or windows are.  That in an of itself is an incredible conceit for a movie, and here it is just one part of a deeply emotional and cathartic film. 

 

A second bold choice in ROOM is that the escape is not the climax.  Where lesser films would end with that, here we follow the struggles of the mother and son to readjust to (or first discover) the rest of the world.  The media are hounding them.  Joy’s parents, played by Joan Allen and William H. Macy, have split up thanks to the horrors thrust upon them by their daughter’s kidnapping.  Jack doesn’t know how to deal with people besides his mother.  Everyone is on edge, and nobody is quite equipped emotionally do deal with the flood of feelings and challenges raised by their reintroduction to the world.

 

At the core of the film are two outstanding performances.  Brie Larson plays Jack’s mother, and her performance is one of the best of the year.  She has to walk a tightrope between letting the audience know how this horrific situation is destroying her, and yet hiding this fact from Jack as she plays along with his elaborate fantasy universe. 

 

But even more surprising is the performance of Jacob Tremblay as Jack.  This may be the best performance by a child actor ever captured on film.  He is the emotional core of the movie, and he’s just astoundingly good.  The script calls for him to show the full spectrum of emotion, from glee to shyness to neediness and to rage, and he absolutely nails each one.  I never thought, “well that’s pretty good for a child actor,” I was just completely won over believing him as a real kid in these circumstances.  And then to think what it must take for a child to portray these emotions he’s never actually experienced is just mind-blowing. 

 

As with any performance by an actor that young, plenty of credit has to also go to the director, Lenny Abrahamson (who previously directed FRANK).  He had the ability coax that performance out of a kid who can’t possibly understand the depth of the material he’s performing (he can’t even freaking read), and also the patience to shoot things enough times to get every take exactly right.

 

I cried like a baby during ROOM.  I’m not talking about a tear welling up here or there, I mean I goddamn waterfall down my face.  It is that affecting.  You are going on an emotional journey here, so be prepared.  It is fraught territory, because the subject matter can easily lead you to feeling manipulated, but that wasn’t the case for me.  Everything from the actors’ performances to the characters’ scripted actions felt realistic.

 

What elevates ROOM from just a great story with great performances is the outstanding direction.  It is a ballsy gamble to stay with two characters in a room only a few feet across for a good fraction of the film, but the choice was ultimately a brilliant one.   This isn’t just an adaptation, this is taking what works on the page and turning into great cinema.   I’m adding Lenny Abrahamson to the list of directors whose work I will seek out without even knowing the subject matter.

 

ROOM opens in limited release October 16, and wide a few weeks after that.  See it.  It is easily one of the best films of the year.