Simply remarkable

Rating: 10/10 (1 April 2016)

Some moments in film will always stick with you. Some of them are more bombastic like when Rocky made it to the top of the steps or when ET and Elliot fly past the moon on the bike. Room is a more subtle film and its many moments are more personal but no less memorable. No film has ever pulled such an emotional and physical response from me. Like the graveyard scene in Saving Private Ryan or the end of Toy Story 3, the more you see it the harder it hits you but this film extends that feeling for two hours.
Much praise has been given to Brie Larson's career defining performance as Ma and she has deserved every award she's won and if there are any she lost she should've gotten them to. She becomes a mother as a teenager, so unprepared, yet she is everything you want in one. Jack is her everything, gives her life meaning that it previously did not have. It's a subtle performance but one of the most powerful, certainly of recent memory. Consider a scene where a reporter asks if she will ever tell Jack about his father. Her response is flawless. The words tell so much but her face... If you watch this scene with the sound of you may not understand what is happening but you will feel everything you are supposed to feel.
What stuns me is how little hardware given to Jacob Tremblay. No child actor in the history of cinema has given a performance half as good as his and like all works of artistic brilliance, I struggle to understand why he is so effecting. Maybe its because he is far too young to understand the weight of what is going on. I think its his eyes, his entire face seems too big for his head, very emotive. Whatever it is, he has me wrapped around his little finger. When he is smiling, I'm tearing up with joy, when he is scared I am sobbing in fear (I've seen this three times and I'm practically dehydrated every time) That is not to say that this film is as easily digestible as ET or Rocky. As its plot would dimply, this film is often dark and it is often disturbing. But this is not the horror film that it so easily could have been (though there is a sequence in the middle that is so intense, i want to call it heart pounding but i can't, my heart stopped cold) in fact this is the most uplifting film since Shawshank. For the payoff to have any emotional impact, you have to put the characters through hell. Ultimately this is a film about survival. Jack survived because he is a child and that is what children do, they adapt. Ma survives too, not because of some inner strength but because of Jack. Watch this film and give your mom a hug