Room (2015) * * * *

Directed by:  Lenny Abrahamson

Starring:  Brie Larson, Jacob Tremblay, Joan Allen, William H. Macy, Tom McCamus, Sean Bridgers

Room is one of the most emotionally devastating films I've seen in a long time.    When it's over, I was drained.    It didn't step wrong.     This is not a feel-good movie, even though it ends on a note of hope.    I thought about its implications and how it affected my own life.     Great movies allow you to think, debate, and feel.     This is one of them.    With that being said, I do not know how quickly I would want to revisit it.     There is only so much raw emotion I can handle.

Room begins in a sparsely furnished room so tiny the mice are probably hunchback.    The occupants are Ma (Larson) and Jack (Tremblay), who turns 5 years old today.     Jack is the child of rape and abuse.     Ma was kidnapped 7 years ago and forced to live in this tiny shed with only a skylight and a TV with bad reception to remind her there is an outside world.     Ma's captor, Old Nick (Bridgers) brings them supplies and food, but rapes Ma almost nightly.   He has the door locked which can only be opened by a security code.   Jack is hidden in a tiny closet, but still can see through the slits.     It is not clear if Old Nick has ever had any contact with Jack.     He refers to Jack as if he were a stranger.

To date, Ma has been able to shield Jack from this horrifying existence by putting on her best face and pretending to be strong.     She does not reveal the true nature of their predicament.     Jack is the only reason Ma probably has not committed suicide up to this point.      How Ma did not give in to despair is a question best left unexplored.      She can not stop the natural progression of Jack's curiosity.     She knows she can not keep the truth hidden forever, so she concocts a daring plan to escape.     Ma reveals in stories she tells Jack about she attempted to escape before, but was punished severely for it.     She is so focused on keeping Jack happy and safe that she neglects her own needs, including a rotting tooth she soon simply has to pull out.  

I won't reveal the escape plan itself, but it does work.    I am not spoiling anything because it is common knowledge that the mother and child manage to free themselves through ingenuity and taking a cue from The Count of Monte Cristo.     Room's second half is about how Ma and Jack have to adjust to the outside world.     Jack has never known anything but Room (the euphemism Ma uses to describe the shed they were trapped in.)    Ma remembers life before being kidnapped, but that may as well have been a lifetime ago.      Her mother and father, now divorced, have a tearful reunion with Ma (whose real name is Joy Newsome), but things become dicey.     The trauma Joy suffered for seven years has taken its toll.    She can not function in the real world.   "I thought I would be happy," she tells her mother.     Most of the time, she is miserable and stays confined to her mother's home.    It is if she exchanged one room for another.

Brie Larson won an Oscar for Best Actress for her role.    It was completely deserved.   What conflicting emotions she had to convey.     She doesn't play the role for sympathy or to pull at the audience's heartstrings.      She is simply a woman trying to process the almost unimaginable psychological trauma enacted on her by a monster.    Her love for Jack took top priority and she unselfishly put his well-being before hers.     We can't even imagine what she went through.    That transcends acting and into total embodiment.

Jacob Tremblay is a nine-year old actor who was seven when Room was made.     Where did he find the strength and the know-how to take on so much of the emotional heavy lifting?     I have to believe director Lenny Abrahamson instilled it in him.      His performance transcends as well.     He is not just a young boy playing a young boy.    He is a boy forced to save his mother on more than one occasion because he is tuned in to her suffering.      Ma sacrificed so much to allow him to cope.    He copes and flourishes with intelligence and sensitivity you rarely see in such a young child.    

If nothing I described makes Room sound like a fun night at the movies, well that's because it isn't.    Movies don't always have to have fun subject matter.     Room invites us to walk in Ma and Jack's shoes for a little while.     The screenplay by Emma Donoghue is based on her novel (which was based on similar real life events), but it allows us to truly feel their situation from the inside out.     How exactly would I react losing seven years of my life in the most dehumanizing way imaginable?    Holocaust survivors did the same thing and 70 years later we are still trying to figure out how it happened and how they survived.     The difference is, we can leave the theater and go back to our normal lives where no such distress has ever happened.    Joy and Jack must live on with it forever.    How do people even process that?     Room unblinkingly explores that.     A lesser movie would have probably had the movie end with a trial or something more "Hollywood".    Room is clearly not a lesser movie.    It stays with you.