Review of Room (2015) by Fungusgnat — 05 Aug 2016

Five-year-old Jack and his Ma live in a shed that Jack calls “Room.” The reason they live in a shed is because (pseudo-spoiler!) the shed’s owner kidnapped her before Jack was born and expects sex from her at his pleasure in return for what he sees as her “having it pretty good” overall. That’s a pseudo-spoiler because it comes only a quarter of the way in, but because without that info you will until that point wonder just what the hell is going on, but because, given the relentless spoiler-rich hype that most films receive these days, you will undoubtedly know that much by the time you initiate the stream or pop the DVD into your player anyway. The best reason for that “pseudo,” though, is that you may have already read Emma Donoghue’s novel. For, while Donoghue has afforded this story as sympathetic a treatment as you might hope a screenwriter would for her own novel, seeing the movie is no substitute for reading the book, or, to put it another way, the book is a better book than the movie is a movie. Naturally, Jack’s first-person voice, one of the book’s great charms, is mostly lost here (and Donoghue, probably wisely, does not attempt to reproduce it). But beyond that, some aspects of the book that could have been reproduced here are not translated to the screen as effectively as they might have been. Examples include the watershed scene at the halfway point, which was at once hilarious and unbearably tense in the book, or Ma’s setback in the second half.

But okay, telling people to read the book (or at least read it first) is a weasely way out of a movie review. If the movie piques your interest and the book doesn’t, you will probably find the film an engrossing and affecting story—one that may touch you with its faith in the durability of love and the resourcefulness of the human mind and heart under outrageous stress. Good marks to all involved.