Room * * * * *

Room is based on one of those terrifying abductions that come along every few years. You know, where some crazy bastard abducts a young person from the street for their own sexual gratification, then keeps them locked up in their basement or some windowless strong room

Knowing what the subject matter was, I was expecting a grueling experience, where the audience would be fed a slow burn until our anger is finally released along with the captured and we happily witness a deserved vengeance.

But Room is much better than that simple formula.  It leaves you so much in admiration of the captive and her son you don’t really care too much about the monster who did this to her or what happened to him, which is probably the way the victim might feel. To be interested in him would be rather like caring about what happens to the dirt you wipe off your shoe.

We learn that Ma was abducted seven years ago when she was seventeen.  We are introduced to Ma as the captive in a Room with her child Jack.  It’s Jack's fifth birthday.  For six years this five by five metre room has been the only world he knows.  It’s where he was born.  Old Nick their captor is his father, but Jack doesn’t know that.

Jack and his mother get up in the morning, they make breakfast, they read the few children's books they have, they make things together with their limited resources, they talk and play, she teaches him to read and write.  She also teaches him that this room is The World. He does not understand they are captives.  He feels no less free in his tiny world than we do in the entire world. For much of this time we are seeing things as Jack sees it. The fact that Jack thinks there are only three real people and everything else is just drawings and little characters on television makes perfect sense.

At night, when Old Nick visits, Ma puts Jack in the wardrobe so he can’t see Old Nick rape his mother (there is no other word for it).  Then one day a  comment from Old Nick causes Ma to realise that soon Jack will be in no less danger of her vile captor than she is.

She decides this lying cannot continue.  She has to re-educate Jack and get him out of the Room and into the real world. Which would rather be like telling an average five year old that nothing is real and now you’re going to push them through a hole and into the real world.  

To tell you how she does it would be a spoiler, but your adrenaline will be absolutely pumping. It is a breathtaking sequence.

Once they are out of that horrid little windowless box and into the real world of safety, freedom and other people, you’d think the change would be so liberating it would be easy. And this is where Room becomes even more challenging, and thought provoking.  To Jack, that little world he was in with just him and his mother was just fine.

Ma returns to her parents home with Jack to find the strain of losing a missing teenage daughter seven years earlier has caused her parents relationship to breakdown.  Now they must not only jointly celebrate her return but accept her child whose father is obviously is the abductor of their own child.

But Ma sees nothing but beauty and feels nothing but love for her child and how she handles her parents and the inevitable media questions is revealing and insightful. Meanwhile out of her parents broken marriage comes another man who is her mother’s new partner. To him, it’s all extended family to be embraced

This is a beautiful film. You might go thinking you'll see a film on the exhilaration of liberation from capture, and you’ll get that; but ultimately it’s one of the best films on acceptance and motherhood you’re likely to see.
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