Every now and then the shocking story becomes headline news: a woman is discovered after being held captive for years in some man’s basement or backroom while neighbors passed by unaware. The reports inspired the fictional story in Room, an Oscar nominee for Best Picture out on DVD and Blu-ray.
In Room, a mother has been held captive for seven years by a sexual predator. The film begins on the fifth birthday of her son, Jack. Despite his paternity, she loves Jack without reservation and shelters him from “Old Nick,” the man who visits her many nights. The boy watches wide-eyed through the door slat of the wardrobe where he hides, seeing little but hearing the creaking agony of sex in the outer room, endured silently by his mother.
Based on the bestselling novel by Emma Donoghue, Room’s early scenes are often shot in claustrophobic close-ups, framed to make palpable the physical and emotional confinement between mother (Brie Larson earned her Oscar for the role) and Jack (Jacob Tremblay). Their lives are circumscribed by the toolshed where they are kept, locked behind a door with a number keypad. The blue patch framed by the skylight is the only glimpse of sky. The shabby container is furnished with bed, tables, chairs, toilet, tub and kitchenette. Old Nick keeps them on tight rations, and when angry, shuts off electricity. The film gathers the details of their confinement slowly. Old Nick is an unremarkable-looking middle-aged man, verbally and physically abusive, though seemingly bound by vestiges of propriety. Director Lenny Abrahamson mirrors the novel’s narration by Jack by shooting some scenes from the boy’s point of view. Larson and Tremblay’s performances are well modulated and thoroughly believable.
The wobbly pictures on a little TV, his mother’s stories and reading lessons from a handful of books (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland among them) provide Jack with his education. A bright boy, he has difficulty at first accepting his mother’s revelation that the room they inhabit is only an insignificant sliver of a greater world outside. “We can’t keep living like this,” she tells Jack, purposefully planting seeds of curiosity about the wider reality beyond their room. She begins to plot an escape plan.
Room becomes a gripping drama as mother prepares to send Jack into the world for help; at all points it’s an acute and carefully observed study of life under great duress. The world outside the room is the goal, but as Jack learns, that world has its troubles, too.
