"Room": Tour De Force Performances tell a Brutal Story of Survival.

Rating: 8/10 (7 May 2016)

After God's love for us all, a mother's love for her child is the most powerful force in our universe. Never is this inestimable strength more explosively in evidence than in the relentlessly gripping domestic drama "Room".
Brie Larson unequivocally earns her Best Actress Oscar as Ma, a young woman who at 17 is kidnapped by a sick fu-- and held as a sex slave in a suburban backyard garden shed for the better part of a decade. During this time she bears a son, Jack (Jacob Tremblay in a stunning and utterly natural performance). For five years this boy believes the "real world" consists only of this 11 x 11 foot prison he and his mom inhabit. Until the day that Ma stuns him with the declaration that there is a vast and diverse existence beyond the four walls of "room". And she hatches a plan that may just lead to at long last freedom from the sinister oppression of the evil incarnate "Old Nick".
At this point in the story Director Lenny Abrahamson takes us on the rocky journey experienced by survivors of unspeakable trauma, both from the perspectives of those who lived through the ordeal and those whose lives were devastated in the "not knowing". It is here where Larson and Tremblay, along with the great Joan Allen as Ma's mother, Nancy, and Tom McCamus as her partner in particular, shine with poignant ferocity amidst a consumptive crucible of relief, remorse and regret. And never is there a false note struck among the emotional carnage.
As "Room" concludes we find Ma and Jack together gaining at least some measure of closure to the horror that has befallen them. And while it is certainly not a happy ending by any standard, it is nonetheless one of, while admittedly tenuous, hope for the future. And considering what may have been in this oh so sad chronicle, this represents infinitely more than we as an audience could have hoped for at the outset of this deeply moving examination of the triumph of the human spirit.