No room for 2015's Room

Rating: 6/10 (12 September 2016)

Sometimes a person's world can be as small as a stifling room. Specifically, when a 17-year-old girl is kidnapped by a man who uses her as his sex slave, having abducted her sever years earlier producing her child. Surprisingly the movie is now 125th ranked IMDb movie of all times,but bewildered movie's director, Lenny Abrahamson, should have realised some troubles in this 118 minutes. Firstly, we all thought the boy was a girl. Is it so difficult to cut his hair a little bit? So, we are expecting Ma to have lied about his gender so that he would not be a rape target. But not – towards the end you realize it is a boy. Why were we so distracted by that for absolutely no reason? Then the director had created 50 intriguing first minutes provoking questions like: 'are they going to die enclosed?' or 'will they somehow try to escape?' whereas in the second half he fabricated a clumsy and infinitely one-dimensional and boring drama. There is just no real connection between the first and the second act. The seven years Ma previously spent in the room might as well have been a written premise at the start of the movie. But with no deeper layers to the film and with no character really fleshed out, the picture feels aimless. Maybe the first part of the movie was that brilliant that the second half does not live up to it. Unfortunately, the Irish filmmaker did not find harmony like he previously did in Frank (2014) and What Richard Did (2012). If the movie had finished just before they have escaped from the garden shed that would have been great. He should have probably said to himself: "As the movie is so-called 'Room', I must focus more on what happens inside the room and go with the flow with all the rest of it". Nice effort 'my friend' but this does not work like this, mainly because this is a potential Oscar winning movie and what you have done is just not even enough to be nominated for the Oscar awards. With such a bloodcurdling topic, a seven year prisoner who has been abducted and her little child discovering for the first time the existence of a brand new world outside a room where he was born, the story struggles to hold our interest as the outside world intervenes. The issue as cinema-goers is that we have simply expected to find the cherry on the pie – to see something unexpected and pleasurable, and what Abrahamson does to all cinemaddicts is living them starving because nothing interesting happens at all. Put simply, we know how this part of the story goes – they both are stressed, later they come down and eventually adapt to the house rules. That is really sad and the worst thing is that with a sort of plot like this, the movie has got a score of 8.3 out of 10 on IMDb! How come this movie is better than The Truman show (1998), A beautiful mind (2001) or Gran Torino (2008)? You should open your eyes and ears people and do not rate movies so generously next time. This is definitely one of those movies that the IMDb rating makes you imagine some sort of Life is Beautiful unfolding in a room. In here all is about an annoying kid and his annoyed mom stuck in a room. They both manage to escape the room and guess what? They continue to be annoying and annoyed. The characters are so completely one dimensional that the movie fails to both entertain or be insightful. You end up feeling stuck with the characters in this two hour long ordeal. Like someone dragging a fingernail on a chalkboard.