Try to Watch This Film "Cold"

Rating: 8/10 (14 January 2016)

First things first, I do my absolute best not to ever write a "spoiler" review. I'm going to honor that pledge with this review, but I have to say that this is a hard movie to do justice to without spoiling it. But I think I can, so read on.
I decided to go see a random movie this afternoon after seeing the 2016 Oscar nominees were released. This movie is nominated for Best Picture, and it was the one of the three nominees playing at the local indie-flick theater in town that was about to start when I arrived at the theater, so I chose to see it.
The most important thing you can know about "Room" is that it's worth seeing at least once. It's a pretty simple, low budget movie, so no special effects or anything like that, so if you'd prefer to wait for the digital release you can. Regardless of when you view it, though, my suggestion is to try to go into this movie without knowing virtually anything about it. Seeing it cold, without having read any reviews or heard a thing about it, will greatly augment the experience.
I say that because that's how I went about seeing this movie, and not knowing what it was about really made it quite powerful for me. So while it's fine to wait to see it at home, don't let anyone tell you about it between now and when it hits digital release.
Now, here's the one, tiny spoiler--nothing huge here, but just one slight tidbit that I have to reveal in order to write much of a review at all: This movie has a significant plot twist to it. That's all I'm saying, but the point here is that in going into this movie cold and not knowing a thing about it, I thought I was watching a certain story play out on the screen, and then the plot twist hit........and WOW. Man, oh man. I did NOT see that coming.
That said, I'll finish here by saying a few words about the quality of the film. The acting is great. The cinematography is great. And for a low budget movie, it does what it sets out to do very effectively.
The only thing that I might be slightly critical of is that as the plot develops this movie gets a bit odd--not in the content of what the story is about (although that is odd in and of itself), but rather that after that plot twist happens it seems like everybody in the film becomes a very irrational actor. For me, this made the film suffer a bit, as I kept looking at the decisions that people made as the plot moved on and I thought, "That's not very believable." And yet, the more I think about it, the fact is that the irrational decisions and far fetched mindset that so many of the characters have in this movie may actually make it more believable, since people tend to be irrational creatures.
That having been said, I'd give the early portion of this film a 10, and the rest of it a 7. It gets worse as it moves on, but at no point does it ever become a bad movie. The other downside is that it's not a film that would be very re-watchable--it's probably not one that you're going to want own on Blu Ray so you can see it over and over again. But it's definitely worth seeing once. All in all I'd call it an 8.
So, 8/10 stars for me.