Room

Rating: 7/10 (26 April 2018)

What is a room? It's an enclosed space. Those two notions, when broken down, alomst seem incompatible, for to be enclosed is to limit or constrain the space within something, whereas space is the expansive area in which things, people, and places exist. But unbounded space is not only infinite, but also almost meaningless, since spaces are defined by their boundaries. This is the heart of what Room is about: the fundamental hum,an exoperience of and connection to space, spaces, and the reality of people and things within those spaces to our conception of the world around us and our experience even of our own selves.
Room explores these ideas overtly and narration that explicitly speaks from the perspective of one of the main protagonists, a young boy with extremely limited and innacurate experience of the world even for his young age, on confused notions of "inside" and "outside". His whole reality, all he's ever known is a single Room and to him it is the world. It is also a prison. His mother is a young woman who was kidnapped as a highschooler and repeatedly raped (and thus impregnated) by her captor (also the boy's father). He believes the outside world doesn't really exist and the images of the outside he sees on the TV they were provided in thier "home" are fake. There are no real trees or dogs or cars, because he only sees them in images on a screen and was told by his mother (ostensibly for the sake of sparing him knowledge of that which he may never see) that these things were not real and that all that was real was their world: "Room". Much like we call our world "Earth".
There's a whole lot of the "Allegory of the Cave" in this tale. When the characters eventually break free (after a tense escape plan) they must strugle to adapt their reality. They have opposite, but equally difficult adjustments to make to reconcile their new reality with thier old one. The child has a bigger gap to bridge: the entire conception of reality he has has been a mixture of confusion, simplification, limitation, and lie (albeit white lies). When his mother starts explaining the truth, it is litterally world shattering to him and he reacts with hostility and denial (as we all do when our Truths are challenged). When he actually sees the outside world, it is strange, surreal, and overwhelming to him. He cannot process the stimulation, the pace, and complexities. But he is young and still "plastic". His situation, while extreme, is not so different for a concentrated does of the kind of confused revelations that all childhood consists of, and which allow for growth and expansion. His world, though expanded radically, becomes quickly accepted. Relatively speaking, anyway.
His mother, on the other hand, initially deals much better. She has the euphoria of escaping and being safe. She is not overwhelmed and has an ingrained muscle-memory of how to interact with people, things, and to live in the world. Only after some time does the horrifying and inescapable truth set in: that, although she's escaped and now is back living in a world she'd spent the last 7 years dreaming and praying she mght one day return to, a whole chapter of her early life was stolen, the trajectory of her life inalterably transformed from what it could have been, and in some sense her life can never be normal. She can't go back to being a teenager. The people she left behind, though they no doubt suffered, went on living. They aren't the same. Her parents are both older, divorced, and changed. She may have reclaimed life, but not her old life... that is gone forever. The acceptance of the new is more easily accomplished than letting go of the past and of lost dreams.
These dual existential crises continue to be portrayed throughout the film as problems of space, of size and scope. The mother can't relate to the people she held so close before because they no longer share a common point of reference. No one can know what she's been through or how she's feeling. She feels alone. The boy sees so much that he just can't square, he feels the opposite of alone, instead retreating inward and wishing to retreat back to "Room" where everything was so much simpler: just him and his mom and the transient, though traumatic, prescence of their captor ("Old Nick" as they called him). Later in the film, though both a gesture of solidarity and of some intrinsic commonality between these two poles and by some dialogue, the film expands that isolation of self through shared human love... stating that we as human find strenth in each other-in our relationships and mutual support-an expansion of self that creates community and family in much the way the world of the enclosed space of a room can expand to break free of those boundaries to include many rooms and many spaces within a multiplicity of spaces.
There's so much mataphor and subtext here that a single viewing and the time and thought I've given it thus far can't possibly fully flesh out all the dimensions of this film. It's applicatible to so many things-social, psychological, anthropological. But it's also a film deeply intimate in our humanity and in the portrayal of the characters, their experiences, the overall transitions and transformations for those characters, and well executed attention to small details like that the boy has to now learn to walk down stairs or wear shoes for the first times. It struggles with the contradiction of how a prison can nevertheless become a place we may still in some way regard as "home" and even miss once gone, all while still being glad to be free from it. Much the way we can miss an ex from an otherwise bad relationship or miss a small crumby apartment during difficult times after moving to a better, bigger dwelling, or miss simplistic notions of childhood once we've learned and grown and become wiser. Those smaller, simpler, albeit more confining and even hostile worlds, may not exactly represent a kind of Stockholm sindrome so much as they represent the innature human tendency to perceive reality and attach a sense of our own personage, of both ownership and identity, to our surroundings and our sense of self. A room is not just an enclosed space, but typically refers to a purposefully but arbitrarily made one, crafted and maintained both for refuge from the hostile outside world and also to give structure and organization to an otherwise unstructured and chaotic reality of nature.
Room is not just an enclosed space, but space itself. To have room is to have space and to have more room is to have more space. As rooms and spaces expand or contract, so to do their bounded realities. When the mother and boy return to "Room" at the end of the film, it looks impressively small on the screen (wonderful cinematography) whereas earily it had seemed quite large with lots of scenes shot at different angles and dialogue of our child protagonist detailing the expanse of his territory ("good morning, sink!, good morning, chair!, good morning bed!"). There's a lot of subtle camera work like this and small plot or sequence elements that add richness to a film that otherwise could have just been another A&E special about a kidnapping victim. But this one does not begin a crime and end with an escape. This one begins with introducing and fleshing out a world, small though it may be, then explaining its origin and by explaining that world it thus tears apart and breaks that world down like Captain Ahab finding the White Whale. The great secret of this reality being revealed, the challenge is to escape from this reality and back to that Golden Age of Before, before the cataclysm, only to find that the old world cannot be rebuilt. The film ends, not with the destuction of the world we finally found to be fraudulent, but with the confrontation of incompatibility between the past, present, past-perceived futures, and presently-perceived futures in the narrative of a human mind and within the turmult of the human heart and spirit and the difficult and painful process of reconciling, processing, absorbing, and reframing those things to create new realities. So it is with all tragedy, loss, grief, and trauma. This film has the courage to stand up and really look at these concepts in smart, honest, realistic ways.
Room is not a happy or even pleasant experience, but it is moving, deep, and memorable. It does offer hope and a good deal to chew on for days, weeks, months to come. While the overt overtures to spatial concepts and identity are there, they are well complimented by an easier to follow narrative of human tragedy and emotion along with less overt nods to those topics to continue adding dimension at times where the film might have otherwise has reverted to formulaic linear storytelling. It's not a movie you'll long to see again to relive the experience, but it is a movie that will stick with you long enough that you end up rewatching to continue peeling that onion.