It's been a couple of weeks since I saw Room, and what I still can't forget are the eyes — Brie Larson's, haunted and alert, and Jacob Tremblay's, wide and wondering.
In many ways, the film is about seeing — how we see and construct the world around us, especially when that world is severely limited. It says something for the director, Lenny Abrahamson, and for the intensely involving performances of his two actors, that when you leave this movie you may feel like you're looking at the world for the first time, too.
Adapted from Emma Donoghue's extraordinary best-selling novel of the same title, Room takes the familiar suspense trope of the captive woman and turns it outside in. Larson plays Joy, a young woman kidnapped at age 19 and imprisoned for seven years in a suburban back-yard garden shed, where she struggles to create a normal life in abnormal circumstances for her young son, Jack, sired by the man who abducted and raped her.
The novel unfolds solely from Jack's point of view, and the movie preserves his perspective via voiceovers through which we come to understand that "Room" with a capital "R" is his word for "world" — "I zoomed down into Room," he says, explaining his concept of birth.
But we are also acutely aware of what Joy is thinking. Her Room, her world, has been forced on her, but her zealous devotion to Jack is what keeps her going, and, eventually, provides a path toward escape.
The details of that escape unfold in almost unbearably suspenseful fashion, not least because Jack is at the heart of the plan. We experience with him not only his terror but his first glimpses of sky, and trees, and strangers, all nearly as scary as trying to evade his abductor. And when in the latter half of the film, he and his mother move into a world of media intrusion and domestic tension, we're with him as he shies away from all this new stimuli and gradually begins to trust.
The filmmakers are deeply empathetic to the bond between parent and child, not just between Joy and Jack, but between Joy and her own parents. As her estranged father, William H. Macy makes a brief but searing appearance, his love mixed with discomfort he can’t shake. Joan Allen subtly expresses both the relief and the wariness Joy's mother feels when reintroduced to her daughter — and in one of the loveliest scenes in the movie, bonds with her new grandson via the mundane but lovingly intimate ritual of a haircut and shampoo.
But it's the profound connectedness between Larson and Tremblay that is central to the film. Tremblay, 8 years old at the time the film was made but utterly convincing as a 5-year-old, is astonishingly good at conveying Jack’s awe at each step he takes in his new universe.
And Larson’s riveting, fiercely committed performance makes you believe that even a prison can be made into a home through the power of a mother’s love — and a child’s imagination.
Four stars
Now playing at Tampa Theatre. Opens Friday at Muvico Sundial, St. Petersburg. Directed by Lenny Abrahamson. Starring Brie Larson, Jacob Tremblay, Joan Allen. Rated R.
This article appears in Nov 26 – Dec 2, 2015.