The Best (And Worst) Mother’s Day Movie on Netflix is ‘Room’

Warning: This article contains mild Room spoilers.

There are plenty of movies on Netflix that you could watch with your mom on Mother’s Day. You could watch Otherhood, a cute Netflix comedy starring Patricia Arquette, Angela Bassett, and Felicity Huffman as three moms whose sons forget them on Mother’s Day. Or you could watch Julie & Julia, a heartwarming Nora Ephron film starring Meryl Streep as the chef Julia Child. Or… you could watch a movie about a mom who is trapped in a very small studio apartment with her 5-year-old son, where she is forced to invent creative ways for him to enjoy his childhood, which becomes increasingly difficult to do the longer they are trapped inside. I’m speaking, of course, of the 2015 film Room.

To be quite honest, I’m shocked more people aren’t watching Room on Netflix right now. It’s perfect for the kind of people who were renting Contagion in early March, or binging Pandemic on Netflix. Room gets too real, not about a contagious virus, but about the extreme difficulty of raising a child in a small, confined space. Directed by Lenny Abrahamson and written by Emma Donoghue (who also wrote the 2010 book), Room stars Brie Larson as Joy Newsome, a woman who’s been in captivity for seven years, and is raising a 5-year-old son, Jack (Jacob Tremblay).

Jack thinks that the tiny garden shed where Joy’s kidnapper keeps them is the entire world. He calls it “Room.” Every morning, he says hello to the few things in the world that exist, like Lamp, Plant, TV, and Bed. He watches TV, but he knows none of it is real. Monsters don’t exist because they’re too big. Neither do the ocean or trees, for the same reason. Spiders are real, because they exist in Room, but dogs are made up.

Joy lets her son go on thinking this way, because it’s better than taunting him with the life he can’t have—a life where he might do things like go to school, hang out with friends, or go out for ice cream. It’s an excellent film. It’s also almost too real right now, for reasons I probably don’t have to explain to anyone quarantining with young kids.

And yet, while you definitely shouldn’t have those young kids in the room when you hit play (it’s rated R), I do think Room is a great watch for Mother’s Day in quarantine. For one thing, it’s nice to remember that, while moms and kids alike are stuck inside right now, things could be worse. We could, for instance, be trapped inside for seven years in the pre-streaming era, with nothing to watch besides low-quality daytime TV. We could also have our lives completely controlled by an evil rapist. (Sure, one of those things is significantly worse than the other, but I think we can agree they are both bad.) If Brie Larson can hang in there, so can we.

Plus, one thing that Room has that Contagion does not have, is—spoiler alert—one of the most satisfying escape scenes of all time. I’ll spare you the details so that you can watch this masterpiece of a sequence play out for yourself, but if you’ve seen the trailer, then you know that Joy and Jack do escape their little prison. Room will give you hope that someday, we’ll escape our quarantine headquarters, too. It might not be quite as dramatic as Jack and Joy’s escape, but it will happen.

Finally, it’s just like, a really, really good movie. It earned four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture—and totally should have won, don’t get me started—and won Best Actress for Larson, launching the next phase of her career. It also jump-started the career of child actor Jacob Tremblay, who was most recently seen in the raunchy Seth Rogen comedy Good Boys. It’s a movie about pain, despair, trauma, but also hope. Room will remind you that, while it won’t be easy, we will work through our collective trauma together, and we will heal.

Watch Room on Netflix