Review of Room (2015) by Gary P — 22 Jul 2017

Film is better than television. There; I said it. Now live with it.

There is an old sales axiom; "Walking past the close." If I stare urgently into your eyes and tell you I am leaving the country and "I have to sell my old red convertible; right now; for £1000; do you want it? I promise it's a bargain; but do you want it?" Well; there is some chance you might say yes.

But if I tell you I am leaving the country and I have to sell my old red convertible; right now; for £1000; it's a Triumph Spitfire, with black leather seats and chrome wheels; it's actually the Mark IV, automatic transmission... well by now I have given you four pieces of additional information, any one of which might be the reason for you to say no. You don't like Spitfires. You hate black leather in convertibles; it gets too hot in the summer. The Mark IV? That was the rubbish one they made in the 70s! Automatic? Really? Are you serious?

If each item in the list had a 50% chance of being a feature you did not want, by the time I have paused for breath I have cut my prospect of a sale down by 94%; whatever chance I had after "Red convertible;" I now only have 6% of that.

So it is with the endless, over sold, coiling excreta that is the modern box set. How many stories really need 10 hours to tell? By the fourth hour the camp fire is dead. By the sixth hour the Ayahuasca has worn off. If you are still working up to your big finale come hour ten you are not a master storyteller, you are a massive bore.

By contrast, 90 minutes and a one big cinema screen is a perfect medium, delivering both narrative completion and audience immersion. The right seats in the right cinema with the right audio will draw you, through towering human expression, into the lives of rendered characters with unsurpassed power.

Lenny Abrahamson's Room is not a film to see on a big screen because it has dazzling special effects or jaw dropping cinematography. It is a film to see on the big screen because such resolution and closeness, when holding on a child's luminous face, will drop you into that child's mind more vividly than a smaller screen in a lighter space with a weaker soundscape.

Room is a film to see on the big screen because quality always trumps quantity.

Film is an old, classical art. Movies have been with us for over a century. The craft is narrow and heavily formalised. Yet working inside this apparently limited frame an infinite range is possible.

Room is not avant garde; it is universally accessible. It is not grotesque or harrowing; I watched it with my 11 year old. It is not saccharine or cynical. It is not trying to extract every drop from every beat.

But it is emotionally raw, shot with humour and pain. Every image is transfixing. It is unique.

It is less a drama than a portrait; a single picture of a mother and child, drawn with immense depth and care; spread over time rather as an oil painter slowly layers his composition.

We are not taken on a classic protagonist's journey; we start with a young child who is brimming with innocence, passion, love, common sense and honesty... and finish with a young child who is brimming with innocence, passion, love, common sense and honesty. But this is not to say the film lacks momentum or suspense. His journey is fractal; one of symmetry at scale.