As critics have widely noted, it’s about the enduring love of mother and child that somehow transcends sadism, trauma, and an inescapable feeling of powerlessness-in a sense, what historians call “agency,” the way that humans carve out lives through sheer force of will in even the most (literally) confining circumstances.Ĭritics have often described Room as a feminist film, and I would suggest that it is. So what is Room about? On one level, it is about how anyone adapts to gruesome conditions, whether a concentration camp, gulag, plantation, prison, or backyard shed. The real world parallels are well-known enough: author Donoghue looked at horrifying cases of women’s imprisonment and rape, such as the notorious Fritzl story in Austria as she wrote the book, while another, similar case emerged after it was released (the Ariel Castro kidnappings-that motherfucker was sent away for life plus 1000 years). For five years she has raised a child, Jack, in this small room, attempting to cope with her dehumanizing circumstances while making Jack’s strange, claustrophobic world as intelligible to him as possible. That, of course, is an awful lot of freight to put on one movie-especially a film that, for much of its duration, concerns only two actors interacting in a tiny space, one of whom was a seven or eight year old boy at the time of filming (albeit playing a five-year-old).Īgain, the facts are simple: Brie Larson plays Ma, a woman who has been detained for seven years after being kidnapped by a rapist psychopath and installed in a tiny shed for which only he, “Old Nick,” controls exit and entry. The truth is that the film pushes against the outer boundaries of what we understand about love, family, parenting, epistemology, and even the meaning of existence itself. But there is always a gap between facts and truth.

Room is the adaptation of a popular novel by Irish writer Emma Donoghue, with a screenplay written by the author herself and ably directed by Lenny Abrahamson.

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