The flip side of freedom

Rating: 7/10 (14 March 2016)

In 'Room', there are lots of things we don't see. We don't see how the lead character, Joy, is raped by her abductor who keeps her imprisoned for more than five years with her little son Jack. We don't see how she is liberated by the police, after she manages to let her son escape. We don't see what happens to her abductor and rapist.
The director doesn't show all these things, because they distract from the theme of this movie: the way mother and son cope with their freedom. The surprising thing about this film is that this freedom turns out to be rather problematic in a lot of ways. Even so much so, that Jack starts to long for the intimacy and the routine of life inside the shed he called Room.
The film shows how life in Room is claustrophobic, but also intimate and familiar. There are no unexpected developments in Room, but there is a lot of love between mother and son. Once they escape Room, everything changes. For Jack, who has never known a world outside Room, this is very threatening. He has to share his mother's attention with other people, he has to get used to all sorts of impulses, he has to learn how things like a telephone work.
In this film, there is only one major dramatic event: Jack's escape and the subsequent liberation of his mother Joy. The rest of the film is rather uneventful: at first we see Joy and Jack in their daily routine in Room, and afterward we see them cope with all sorts of problems in the house of Joy's parents. Still, the film is almost never boring. The psychological developments make up for the lack of real action. And although there quite some emotional scenes, the director didn't make an outright tearjerker.