“Room” is about the unnerving experience of two people being stuck sweating out a codependent existence in a small enclosed space: In the theater, it was just me and an actress gunning for this year’s No-Makeup Oscar (TM).
Brie Larson monotonously plays Joy, a young mother locked in a filthy shed with her 5-year-old son, Jack (Jacob Tremblay), for reasons that are at first withheld from the audience. The first 40 minutes or so consist merely, and irritatingly, of director Lenny Abrahamson slowly revealing what has happened before the movie starts: Joy was kidnapped seven years ago, at 17. Ever since, she has been a sex prisoner of her captor (Sean Bridgers), meaning Jack is his son.
Old Nick, the kidnapper, brings supplies every week and takes the opportunity to rape Joy on each occasion. You or I would simply tie his hands to the bed while he’s asleep and snip off bits of him until he gives up the security code to the locked door. Instead, she does moronic things like telling her boy to play dead on the assumption that Nick won’t bother to check whether the kid is still breathing before burying him.
Dopey as the film is on a plot level, it’s equally vapid in its psychology. The script, adapted by Emma Donoghue from her own novel, doesn’t illuminate what kind of internal damage might be wrought by being held prisoner for seven years: On-screen it simply looks like Joy has a case of the sads. The sitcom “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” is, comparatively, a deep dive into the soul.
For a young woman freshly escaped from captivity, making herself pretty again would be priority No. 2, right after stabbing her captor in the crotch with an ice pick, but Larson is so determined to get that NMO that she sticks with the bare-faced look throughout; even after a TV interviewer puts highlights in Joy’s hair, she apparently re-dyes it back to mousey. At times she seems to prefer captivity to freedom, and so does her son. The movie amounts to an unexplained case of Stockholm syndrome for a shed, unless you agree with Donoghue that TV reporters are scarier than rapist-kidnappers.
Worse than any of this is Abrahamson’s decision to have the kid talk about his reactions to a world he has never experienced in egregiously cutesy phrases like “The world’s always changing in hotness and lightness.” It’s supposed to suggest the wisdom of innocence but sounds more like A.A. Milne delivering the weather report.