A dark, feel-good movie

Rating: 7/10 (17 October 2015)

It is difficult to produce a seriously dark film that makes the audience feel good about having seen it, but novelist and screenwriter Emma Donoghue has made the material, director Lenny Abrahamson has delivered the look and feel; and astounding performances by a 23-year-old Brie Larson (Ma) and 7-year-old Jake Tremblay (playing 5-year-old Jack) take the audience through amusement, curiosity, horror, and confusion to a climax that leaves them moist-eyed and content that things will work out.
The cinematography, considering the 10-foot square set, was brilliant. The escape sequence, seen both from the astounded Jack's eyes as well as a drone's eye view, grabs the viewer and makes him feel he IS little Jack, if just for a moment.
As the escape is executed, it becomes plain that this is a high-grade chick flick. Instinctive motherhood and female mind games that most men would never think of present revelations to those with Y chromosomes, twists that that the brutal Old Nick (Sean Bridgers) never sees coming. Brie Larson's acting, even as her character acts, convinces everyone.
There are only three, well, two questions that much of the audience may have: 1) Why was grampa Robert (in a fairly brief appearance by William H Macy) unable to look at Jack? 2) Why did it take forEVer to get Jack's hair cut? (This question is beautifully resolved, by the way.) and 3) This is when you know it is a woman's story: Why, in seven years of captivity, did Ma never think to stand the bed on its end and climb out through the plastic skylight?
Those questions aside, ROOM gets ten stars for acting, direction, and cinematography. It loses three stars only for the minor plot fails.