There's a silver lining in "Room"

For about the first hour of Lenny Abrahamson's "Room" (2015, USA), the film takes place solely in the titular setting, as a young mother and her 5-year-old son are held "prisoners" in that cramped space for about 7 years already (the mother says so). They are visited every now and then by a certain "Old Nick" (who holds the code to the room's lock), sometimes to bring them groceries and sometimes to get sexual favors from the mother and who's in fact their captor. The only way that the mother and child (and the viewers) can get a view of the "outside world" is through a square-shaped skylight on the room's ceiling. Sounds like a boring movie, right? What with everything (at least for the first hour) just happening inside the room itself. However, because of Abrahamson's deft direction, the room somehow becomes a universe in itself, with us becoming drawn in to the mother and child's regular activities that we almost never imagine the two of them being "outside" their abode (not that, plot-wise, they actually have the liberty to get out). 

Thus, through a daring plan hatched by the mother, when the two of them are finally able to free themselves from captivity, it lamentably turns out that, though not exactly prisoners in the legal sense of the term, the world outside just proves to be another kind of prison, much bigger and more harsh, as the saying goes. As such, "Room" is a harrowing film, demonstrating once more the depths to which human cruelty can go. While not vividly stated (Emma Donoghue's screenplay avoids any explicit details or depiction of the abuse as much as possible), the mother and child's years-long captivity in the room is a consequence of a sexual crime committed against Joy, the mother (played by Brie Larson, stunning), of which Jack, the son (played by Jacob Tremblay, riveting and whose features in the film resemble those of the child in François Truffaut's "Wild Child") is the outcome. Old Nick (played by Sean Bridges, nasty) has successfully held Joy and Jack in that forsaken space for so long that her parents have already considered her as dead. When the long-haired 5-year-old Jack opens his eyes for the very first time to the outside world (while he's lying at the back of the captor's truck), it's like literally coming out of the mother's womb, an act of birth. The experience (for both him and the viewers) is both liberating and fearsome, in that while he's finally freed from a limited confinement, he's then about to venture into the unknown. 

Still, the beauty of "Room" is that the terrible human condition is being offset by the strength and power of the mother's unconditional love for her child. It serves as the silver lining in this dark cloud of abuse and trauma. With genuine love and care, Joy is able to see beyond the fact that Jack is the "unplanned" product of a sexual crime in as much as it also helps her greatly in guiding him through living in the outside world. This kind of mother-and-child story is highly prone to being reduced to a sappy and soapy drama, more typical for a Mother's Day offering. But Abrahamson's and Donoghue's handling of the material sees to it that the life of the main protagonists is always in a precarious balance - that there's no certainty if they can quite attain and maintain a more blissful life now that they're freed from the confines of the room. There's just the constant houndings of the past, the expected vagaries of the present and the unavoidable challenges of the future. Such matters as partial family acceptance (at least on the part of Joy's father), reluctance to undergo a professional therapy and the child's not-entirely-complete detachment from the "room" can only exacerbate the tipping of the scale towards precariousness. Thus, in a sense, this is the kind of loving to a fault. 

In Abrahamson's previous film "Frank", the titular character deliberately and literally entraps himself within a "mask" of artificial identity to conceal what he thinks are the "scars" from a troubled childhood. Here, we have a character living in a trap of his own making. In "Room", we have characters who are also trapped, though not necessarily by choice. Yet, this is something that can be qualified, because once Joy and Jack are able to move themselves out of the physical confinement of the room, it seems that they are still trapped in the outside world, through some kind of emotional maladjustment or inhibition that they are unable - or perhaps unwilling - to overcome (Joy has a suicide attempt;Jack misses the relative safety and familiarity of the room). Much like the dwellers in Plato's cave, the mother and child, through a long-forced habit, have learned to accustom themselves to the kind of reality that they are experiencing within the room - the only reality for them (at least up to a certain extent of time). Any "external" truth that finds its way inside the limited space or has started to be encountered outside is initially met with fear, anxiety, confusion and doubt. 

The irony of the freedom here is that while we are disheartened when we begin to learn the circumstances surrounding Joy and Jack's confinement, we are not entirely free of anguish when they are finally brought back outside, for we also realize that there may be no certainty as to the mother and child's capacity to assimilate themselves once again into mainstream life. Fortunately, the film's final sequence does signal hope. 

The power of unconditional love amid cruelty in Lenny Abrahamson's "Room"