Based on Emma Donoghue’s celebrated 2011 novel, Lenny Abrahamson’s alternately harrowing and uplifting Room tells the story of a young woman who was kidnapped as a teenager and has been confined to a small, 10 x 10-foot reinforced shed in her captor’s backyard for seven years, the last five of which have been spent raising a son who was born inside the shed and therefore has no idea there is a world outside of it. For him, “Room,” as he calls their tiny environment, is literally the entire world, and the only people that exist are Ma and Old Nick (Sean Bridgers), their sadistic captor who brings them supplies each week and serially rapes Ma at night, an event the boy witnesses obliquely from inside a closet where she puts him each night to protect him.

The film begins inside the room, and for nearly 45 minutes the camera does not leave its confines as we watch Ma (Brie Larson) and five-year-old Jack (Jacob Tremblay) going about their daily routines—cooking and eating, exercising, watching television, making crafts from scraps of paper and eggshells—which doesn’t look terribly different from what most of us would consider normal, except that they cannot leave the 100 dingy square feet that constitute their world. There is a skylight above them that allows in some light and through which they can see a small glimpse of the sky, but otherwise all they have are four walls, a floor, and a ceiling.

There is an aching poignancy to the relationship between Ma and Jack, especially when, after he turns five, she decides to tell him the truth about their situation, something she has hidden from him out of fear that he could not handle it. He resists at first, as we all would if we were suddenly informed that virtually everything we know about our existence has been a lie. However, understanding the reality of their predicament is crucial because Ma is plotting an escape, largely out of desperation when she learns that Old Nick has been unemployed for six months and is in danger of losing his house and she fears that he will kill them rather than allow them to be discovered. The plot at first involves Jack pretending to be sick with the hope that Old Nick will consent to taking him to a hospital, and when that fails, she concocts an even more desperate scheme in which Jack pretends to have died and Ma has Old Nick take his body, which is rolled up in a rug, to be dumped somewhere.

The sequence in which Jack is taken out of the shed and placed in the back of Old Nick’s pickup truck—the first time in his short life that he has left the confines of Room—is among the most excruciatingly suspenseful sequences I have ever watched, as Jack is flooded with the sensory overload of the outside world while trying to keep enough focus to remember to jump out of the truck when it comes to a stop and run for help. Not knowing how the story would develop, I was convinced that the effort would fail and Jack would be returned to Room and both he and Ma would be punished, which is why I found it so shocking when the plan works. Jack gets the attention of a man walking his dog, who in turn calls the police, who are able to glean enough information from Jack despite his shell-shocked demeanor to find Room’s location and free Ma, thus setting up the film’s second half in which Ma, whose name we learn is Joy, is reunited with her family.

While obviously not as harrowing as being locked inside a 10 x 10 room for the rest of their lives, adjusting to the world that had been denied them for so long is no easy task for Joy and Jack, as she must reacquaint herself with a life she thought lost forever while Jack must learn to live in a world he never knew existed. The thrill, the rush, the absolute exhilaration of their escape runs headlong into the stark reality of the pains of psychological and emotional adjustment, something that is difficult for mother and son for completely different reasons. They are taken in by Joy’s mother, Nancy (Joan Allen), and her boyfriend, Leo (Tom McCamus). Joy’s father, Robert (William H. Macy), who was divorced from Nancy during the years that Joy was missing, is there, as well, but he ultimately cannot handle the emotional toll of being reunited with a daughter he thought was dead and learning he has a grandson fathered by the man who took her, and he leaves. That is just one of the many hurdles that Joy and Jack must surmount as they become acclimated to their new existence, although ironically Jack begins to flourish while Joy begins to suffer from depression and post-traumatic stress.

However, for all the darkness on both sides of the film’s narrative, Room is that rarest of films: one that finds a genuine sense of uplift out of the most despairing of situations without ever feeling forced or mawkish. Irish-born director Lenny Abrahamson, whose previous film, Frank (2014), was a quirky indie about a rock star who wears a giant papier-mâché head, draws tremendous performances from Brie Larson and Jacob Trembley, who are fully convincing as a mother and son who are literally everything to each other. Room is, if anything, an achingly beautiful ode to the power of filial love. Larson embodies a powerful sense of parental commitment distilled to its purest essence—the absolute devotion to protecting one’s child, regardless of personal cost—which is why she is sent off the rails when a reporter questions her decision to keep Jack in the room with her for so long, as if the choice to be with her son and raise him was somehow selfish. Trembley is an astonishing find, a child actor who grips our hearts not because he’s “cute,” but because he’s utterly real. His naiveté both inside and outside the room is poignant, but what we really remember about him is his natural resilience in coping with things most of us couldn’t fathom primarily through his relationship with Joy. Because, in the end, Room is that most old-fashioned of stories, one that boldly asserts without equivocation that love triumphs.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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