How Did Abrahamson Do It?

Rating: 8/10 (13 January 2019)

22 November 2015. What is remarkable about this movie is that the audience members didn't fall asleep for the first half of the movie and that's a great thing. Unlike The Diary of Ann Franke (1959), the underlying and ominous tone of Room doesn't have the constant and imminent death threat from Nazi occupation that helps to sustain the visceral tension that Ann Frank was subjected to. Instead the director was confronted with the challenge of somehow making the mundane and likely boring life in a small room something of modicum of interest. In a way, the audience experiences the same efforts of the mother to keep her child preoccupied as much as possible with the few resources possible. Overall this movie has a deliciously balanced and sustained plot development often times left out of the confined and happily released plot outlines of most mystery thrillers.
The performances are superb and so consistent with the storyline, there isn't any pretense that any of this was stage or acted. The relationships are well developed within the timeframe of the movie and are delightfully varied to reveal the breadth of human responses to such a tragedy. The presentation mostly from the child's perspective made the directorship's job tremendously more difficult but at the same time more captivating and absorbing for the audience. Instead of the usual death lurking around every corner horror genre or the sensationalism of publicity drama, the movie narrowly and richly captures the amazing and arduous behavior of the mother's attempts at some form of normalcy and the doubts surrounding her own competence in having done so.
Like The Miracle Worker (1962), the depiction of a world beyond our own universe, our senses, Room offers up a new way of examining our own environment. Unlike Helen Keller, though the child in Room wasn't limited by his senses, but by his limited surroundings. Nevertheless, the audience is exposed to a refreshing and innovative way to re-examine our own limited senses.