Room (2015)
Directed by Lenny Abrahamson
Held captive for 7 years in an enclosed space, a woman and her young son finally gain their freedom, allowing the boy to experience the outside world for the first time.
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19 films that influenced Room
What critics say influenced Room
El terror infantil –tan cercano al Oliver Twist, de David Lean; a La noche del cazador, de Charles Laughton, o a Posesión satánica, de Jack Clayton– tiene en el relato conjunto de Abrahamson y Emma Donoghue una variante perturbadora.
Old Nick is kept at arm’s length narratively, as this is not his story; this is not John Fowles’s The Collector.
Truman (Jim Carrey) vivía encerrado en un símil de los paradisiacos cabos de Florida, y Chance (Peter Sellers), en Being There, otro individuo que confunde la televisión con la realidad, podía regar plantitas y deambular por las calles.
Just as fantastical fairytales so often unpick the conflicts of family life, so Room owes less to the lurid legacy of the Josef Fritzl case (or to films such as Markus Schleinzer’s Michael ) than to the more everyday experiences of women and children who rise above domestic abuse.
Look to Markus Schleinzer’s excellent Michael for detailed explanations as to how such a man might manage the detention of an unwilling stranger.
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Ma, a bit like Roberto Benigni in Life Is Beautiful, artfully shields her five-year-old from the ghastliness of their shared plight, filling his days instead with fun, games and exercise.
En contraste, no se necesita ser víctima de un reality show tan elaborado como The Truman Show para entender las pulsiones que orillan a Truman a buscar una salida.
“Room” shares much in common with Robert Zemeckis’ “Cast Away” (2000), which starred Tom Hanks as a plane-crash survivor who returns to civilization after four years alone on an island.
I struggle to imagine someone keeping up with the confused, sandwiched turns of phrase Donoghue uses without having contextualised them on the page first, because the result is wordy and twee to the point of parody, and it doesn’t help when Sean Bridgers enters muttering and screaming like a costumed SNL player as kidnapper Old Nick, blaringly abject in a way not seen since Stanley Tucci’s turn in the similarly beset The Lovely Bones.
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In the book, Ma’s faith plays as much a role in her codification of Jack’s abnormal infancy as personifying the mundane items littered around their cubic world, yet Abrahamson and cinematographer Danny Cohen (other Oscar favourites like The King’s Speech and Les Misérables) take exclusively to the latter in the film’s opening, with light bouncing off each of them as she attempts to send distress signals with a bedside lamp.
La cámara del cinefotógrado británico, Danny Cohen (The King’s Speech, 2010; The Program, 2015), hace un excelente trabajo al ponernos en los zapatos del pequeño.
Post-rock band This Will Destroy You’s “The Mighty Rio Grande,” used so effectively in Bennett Miller’s “Moneyball” and then less effectively in every sports television montage since.
The tension of the breakout sequence hinges on Jack internalising the wisdom that Ma imparts to him, and this carries over well from the book despite the emotional cheat of a This Will Destroy You needle drop, previously heard in the trailer for Moneyball (oh look, another recent Oscar contender).