Easily One of the Best Movies of the Year

Rating: 10/10 (11 January 2016)

I went into this movie with some excitement. The trailers didn't make it out to be that great of a movie (originality-wise), but the ratings said otherwise. I am happy to say that this movie surpassed all my expectations and then some.
The plot of Room is one that we've seen before. While it's not horribly original, it's presented much differently than you'd expect. It's more mature than others, and much more personal. The idea of someone living their life away from society and suddenly being exposed to it again is typically used in a more comedic or 'big picture' way. Room deals with the transition in a much more personal way, and it makes way more sense. The characters spend most of their time indoors, dealing with the new problems of living outside of a single 10 by 10 foot room, and there still feels like there's a reason for it. It really is quite a beautiful story, despite how unhappy that it can be.
The characters are brilliant, and the obvious driving force of the movie. Considering for the first hour or so we've only been exposed to three people you really get to know them well. But what are great characters without great actors to portray them? Luckily, Brie Larson as Ma and Jacob Tremblay as Jack are both fantastic. For a child actor Tremblay is phenomenal, and really sells his character. Larson is fantastic too, playing a single mother who's not exactly in the best shape. Everyone else is great too, but the two main protagonists stand out the most.
The first thing I noticed about this movie was the realism. From the opening to the end, everything felt real. Emotionally, it was real (I've already stated that), but it was also visually real. The characters looked real. At the beginning of the movie Ma has a bit of acne, and that really stood out to me. Finally, a movie where people don't have make-up coating their face so that they appeal more to the audience. Brie Larson looked her part, she had acne, bags under her eyes, bad hair. She didn't look like she was trying to impress anybody, which is because she wasn't. This is something that I don't think I've ever seen in a movie, where people look bad and it's never part of the story or addressed or anything, and it really adds the level of immersiveness in the film.
This movie is very emotional. And I don't mean that there's just some climatic sad part at the end, it's spread out. Throughout the movie I felt myself on the brink of tears, and that was with resistance. It brought me closer to crying than any other movie that I've ever seen.
Overall Room is absolutely amazing. It's one of the few movies I've seen where not a thing about it has bothered me. I found no flaw in this movie, making it easily one of the best movies of 2015, if not the best movie of 2015. It's realistic and unique, something that so many movies seem to lack. In the end I would definitely recommend this movie to anyone, whether your interested or not.