Outside the box

Room, adapted by Emma Donoghue from her novel of the same name, is a peculiar hybrid of a movie, and—intermittently, at least—an unusually intriguing one.

The eponymous room, a locked and window-less shed, is the lone setting for the film’s first half. The story’s protagonists, a young mother (Brie Larson) and her 5-year-old son Jack (Jacob Tremblay), are prisoners in that space, and the young boy, who was born there, has never known any other place.

“Room,” as his mother calls it, is virtually his entire world. The only other person to enter that space is the shadowy figure that “Ma” (Larson) calls “Old Nick.” Nick (Sean Bridgers) makes regular visits to the shed, to have sex with Ma and to deliver groceries and other supplies. He alone controls the locks on the shed’s door.

All that, however, is beginning to change. As the film begins, Jack has just reached his fifth birthday, and his mother has begun plotting their escape. And so the relatively brief middle section of Room is a briskly suspenseful account of the ensuing escape attempts, one of which is successful. No “spoiler alert” is really necessary on that last point because the most meaningful suspense in Room has mostly to do with the ways mother and son, separately and together, cope with their release from their “room.”

For Jack, it’s a sometimes overwhelming set of encounters with worldly experiences he has barely glimpsed previously (on TV and in his mother’s story-telling). For his mother, it’s re-entry into her family and a society from which she’s been forcibly sequestered for over seven years. And for both of them and others, there’s the highly fraught issue of a child conceived in captivity.

Some of the best moments in the film arise from its handling of that last issue. The overall dramatic effect, however, is uneven at best. Jack is the point-of-view character for many of the film’s best dramatic moments, and that’s fine insofar as Room is about Jack’s fall from innocence and his youthfully heroic role in his mother’s personal struggles. But a handful of adult dramas are also part of the mix here, and several of them raise more questions than the film has time or room to properly answer.

Larson and young Tremblay both deliver persuasive performances that give the film an emotional coherence even when the narrative gets a little fragmented and chancy. But the stories of Jack’s grandparents, who are divorced, cry out for fuller development. Joan Allen, as the Larson character’s mother, manages to imply a considerable range of mixed emotions while also mirroring the beleaguered courage of her daughter. William H. Macy, meanwhile, gets no opportunity to do much of anything with the alienated father-and-grandfather role.

The Nick character plainly has a strange and twisted story of his own, and Donoghue’s script gives it a couple of brief nods. Nevertheless, Bridger’s Nick is mostly a stock figure (an ordinary-looking guy with a bad temper), and ultimately he’s more significant for what he’s not than for what he is or who he might have been.

Room is an Irish-Canadian production. The director, Lenny Abrahamson, is Irish. Emma Donoghue, who is also one of the film’s producers, was born in Ireland and educated in the UK and is now a Canadian citizen. Room was filmed in Toronto, but the story is set, explicitly and credibly, in “America.”