Extraordinary movie - and now i have to read the book

Rating: Null/10 (18 March 2016)

Emma Donoghue has adapted for the screen her Booker Prize-nominated novel - loosely inspired by some real events - which tells the story of a young woman called (ironically) Joy kidnapped seven years previously and held in a garden shed where five years ago sex with her captor resulted in the birth of her son Jack.
It sounds horrific, but in the end it is actually inspiring because it is less about detention and more about relationships - not just between mother and child but between mother and her parents and between child and his grandparents.
By the time I caught up with the movie, it had been nominated for four Academy Awards and won one, Best Actress for Brie Larson who, most of the time, appears with no make-up and gaunt. But all the performances are impressive, not least that of young Jacob Tremblay as Jack.
The novel is narrated in his words and the film uses his voice-over from time to time which give added poignancy to this remarkable and moving story. Jack is just five and forms a special relationship with a grandparent and I am grandparent to a little one who is just five, so I found the film especially resonant.
Irish director Lenny Abrahamson has done brilliantly in conveying the physical confines of the eponymous room and the psychological restraints under which we all operate. I didn't like his previous work "Frank", which I found too weird, but this is a triumph.