DOI: 10.20375/0000-0011-4882-9
title: The Room

description: Abstract: 
The horror film delves into a family on the edge of breaking apart. They live under terrible humiliations that take the place of sweet words when unpredictable violence replaces security. The family finally disbands when a large wooden door appears one day. They can no longer leave the house after the youngest son vanishes without a trace—a chilling fear of dying results from releasing all the years’ worth of bottled-up pain. Whoever opens the door will perish in agony as the evil begins behind it!
Details:
The movie begins by showing a TV with a cartoon following famous scenes from Kubrick’s The Shining. The man watching TV has Down syndrome and uses a wheelchair. Another sequence shows a man hitting a window with an axe. 
The camera begins a tour of the house. From the ground floor and the man in the wheelchair, it moves up the stairs, following a young boy, and then shows a young woman sleeping in bed. She is pregnant. The room is full of packed boxes and suitcases. In the following, a man at a piano is shown. His desk is riddled with music paper. Just as in the entire house, his desk is decorated with an unsettling bust. Next, the audience is shown a middle-aged woman in a kitchen cutting broccoli. Finally, the camera returns to the man in the wheelchair. Two young boys, looking through the window inside the house, are watching him. The man appears to be resigned. 
The colours turn into black and white. The man lies in bed, and the young woman reads Alice in Wonderland aloud. 
The colours return; it becomes clear that the black-and-white sequence has been a flashback, a memory. The man, still in front of the TV, is approached by one of the boys, who holds a firecracker. Before he can light it, the young woman appears and tells him to stop teasing her brother and that she will call his parents. It is established that only one of the boys is a family member of the house, and the woman and the man have another parent than the other boy. The man with Down syndrome is introduced as Alex. The woman asks him whether he will be fine without her, “like a man .” She gives him a red flower and asks him whether he remembers. She also tells him that she will not forget him.
Another black-and-white flashback follows; only the red of the carpet is colourful: Alex follows the woman up the stairs. Again, the audience needs help hearing what is being said. It is an argument that escalates. In the end, Alex falls down the stairs. The woman clenches her face in pain.
In the present, Alex tells the woman not to worry, that it is “inside his head .” However, he continues to look sad.
Upstairs, the man at the piano is playing. He is visibly annoyed by the young woman who comes to look at the photos. She puts one of Alex as a child in her carrying box. The man then yells at her about what she wants and slams the door shut.
In another flashback, the young woman comes to the man and a woman, apparently her parents, in the living room. She says she must tell them something and proceeds to announce her pregnancy. The parents are disappointed and outraged. The mother gets agitated and yells about who the father is. The young woman does not say whose child it is. The father creepily caresses her cheek, and she flinches. 
In the present, Alex’s tray with a bowl of cereal and a glass of water has fallen. The mother asks him whether “this is the only thing” he is “capable of .” The young woman, Alex’s sister, defends him from their mother. The woman, Marie, asks how he will get along once his sister, Melinda, is gone. Once the mother has left, Melinda refuses to let Alex help her. Alex tells her he does not like the chair, loves her, and wants to stay with her until the end. 
In the kitchen, Marie and Melinda talk about Alex. The mother does not want to care for Alex, which has become his sister’s task. In a flashback, Marie tells Melinda that she must abort the foetus. The daughter contests that she will not, that the baby is “everything she has .” Back in the kitchen, the mother hugs her and tells her she will miss her. Melinda contests that she knows that.
In the garden, the two boys continue to play with firecrackers. It has become evident that they are bullies.
Melinda takes a shower. In a flashback, she again refuses to tell who fathered her child. She says she does not know. The father licks her cheek and violently pushes her onto the couch. 
They all sit at the table to have lunch. They do not talk; the atmosphere is agitated. The father says that he has not heard anything from the record label. He is a composer or tries to be. He then goes into a fit of rage, and an argument ensues. It turns to Melinda wanting to move out of the family’s house. She wants to start over with the baby. 
In a flashback, Alex overhears the parents discussing Melinda’s pregnancy. The father says that she must abort the child and that he will force her to do so. However, the mother says that he cannot do that and that they can give up the child for adoption.
At the table, the boys laugh ceaselessly about Alex and his disabilities. Alex is becoming visibly angry but does not react. Benjamin, the friend, excuses himself and justifies it by saying that he is “not used to something like that .” He says he will go to the bathroom to calm down. The camera follows him upstairs, where the light turns cold and blue. He asks, “What a strange door.” It is at the end of the corridor, where there was no door before. He slowly walks further down the hall. The door creaks. The last that is heard is his long scream. 
At the table, they wonder about the scream. The son, John, looks after him and calls his name. He looks through the other rooms. He also finds the door. Random letters are carved in the old wood, covering the entire frame. He tries to open the door, but it is locked. The door then opens, and he gets sucked through it. He screams, too. 
The door is filmed in rapid cuts with dramatic music. Alex, at the table, looks down. 
After some discussion, the father, Max, Marie, and Melinda look after them. A door has appeared at the end of the hallway. It is still locked. They try to open the door but cannot. The father searches for the boys. They deduce that they must be behind the door.
Back at the table, they try to call the boys, who neither respond to their cell phones. Alex observes them and smiles softly. Unfortunately, the police cannot be reached through the landline, either. Melinda tells Alex not to be afraid; he repeats, “Not afraid,” and smiles. They find out that the house door is locked and that the windows cannot be opened nor smashed in: they are locked in. An argument ensues. 
The father attempts to open the door again. 
Back in the living room, they discuss how to proceed. Alex asks what to do, and Marie tells him to shut up. She speaks of a curse and calls Alex’s disability a “disease” and himself a “paralyzed idiot .” Melinda’s unborn child is labelled a “bastard,” and she is a “slut”. The father laughs and, upon Marie justifying everything she did by telling him she loves him, he hugs the crying woman before he punches her in the face with his fist and screams that everyone must shut up. He also tells Melinda that if she gave birth now, he would watch her wreathe in pain until she tells him the father’s name. Alex says that he is the father of Melinda’s child and that John is, too. Marie slaps Melinda for saying that she has always taken care of Alex. Marie says that they all “knew what happened”; they briefly discuss who is to blame for Alex using the wheelchair. Marie and Melinda say it is Melinda’s fault, but Alex says it is not.
During the night, Marie writes a letter to Melinda. She says that it contains “the truth” and writes about a man called Davide “because the child had Down- Syndrom,” “but one does not hide from one’s children…”. On a post-it that she then sticks to the couch, she writes “3 AM” and that “she cannot.” She then asks Alex to give the letter to Melinda if she does not return. 
The mother approaches the door. She scans the letters carved into the wood. She kneels and sees letters forming ENTER MAMAN (= “Enter, Mother”). The door screaks. She opens the door, calls for John to enter, and closes it. Her scream is heard from the inside. 
Upon waking up in the morning from the scream and finding her gone, the father looks for Marie. Melinda stays with Alex. The door opens, and the father screams but then returns to the living room: he has pranked them. He pushes Melinda to the ground. He then stands in front of Alex, sarcastically tells him he is “the only one that matters,” and insults him. He then tells him, seriously, that everything is Alex’s fault. He continues to shake Alex in the wheelchair. Alex contests by telling him that Max is not his father, nor Melinda’s. He gives Melinda the letter. Max lays on the ground, sucking his thumb and making noises. 
Alex gives Melinda the letter. It tells their mother’s story: she had met a man before Max, Davide, and was engaged to him. They had a child, Alex, and were expelled from their family because of Alex’s disability. They quickly tried for another child, Melinda. Unfortunately, Davide died shortly before Melinda was born in a car accident. Max, his best friend, offered to help the mother and protect her. Max is rolling around on the floor and screamingly accuses Melinda of taking fifteen years to bear him a son. Alex tells Melinda that her parents wanted to adopt her unborn child. 
Max hits the window with an axe, but it does not shatter. He goes insane. He says that Alex has locked them inside the house and that Melinda has pushed Alex down the stairs. Alex defends his sister. Max says that Melinda has pushed Alex down the stairs and takes up the axe to execute Alex, but Melinda knocks him unconscious with a heavy object. Alex tells her that he is hungry. 
In a flashback, Melinda emotionally throws a pregnancy test into a water-filled sink. 
Melinda goes to the door, opens it, and enters the room behind her. It is pitch-dark. There seems to be mud on the floor since her steps produce squeaky sounds. A low, manly voice talks unintelligibly through the darkness. There is a light towards which she moves. The voice appears to belong to Max. The mud on the floor is shining a little in the light. 
Somewhere, a baby cries. Alex suddenly emerges from the fog. He stands, and the wheelchair is gone. He holds a red flower, shakes his head, and points to the right. Two photographs appear in the darkness, first of a crying woman and then of a crying child. They have been shown on a screen that now becomes more visible. Melinda moves towards it. On the screen, disturbing images of disfigured, hurt, and disabled children are shown. Melinda watches them while shaking. Finally, she throws up on the ground. It becomes clear that the shining mud on the floor is gutted. On them lay the bodies of John, Benjamin, and Marie. Alec’s face appears on the screen, looking angry. Melinda screams “No” and runs away. She commands him to let her go, and the door opens. Outside, everything is overexposed and bright.
Melinda processes what she has seen and returns to Alex. Max is gone. Alex tells her that he went upstairs. They discuss whom to blame. Alex tells her that Max has gone upstairs. 
Another flashback: Melinda reads Alice in Wonderland to Alex. He gives her a red flower. He tells her he loves her and asks her to “show it” because he “has never done it.” Melinda opens her blouse. They have intercourse. In the end, she cries. After taking the pregnancy test, Melinda is shown in the bathroom again and screams Alex’s name. 
Melinda sits on his lap and asks Alex if he is happy. She tells her that from now on, “there are only they themselves left, forever.”
The flashback in which Alex follows Melinda up the stairs is shown again. The audience can hear what is said this time: Alex asks Melinda whether they can “do it again.” She refuses, and he demands “again, again, again.” After that, she pushes him down the stairs, causing his need for a wheelchair. 
In the present, Alex asks her to make breakfast. When she returns, red flowers blossom from the floor, the ceiling, and the wall. There are also paintings of Melinda from inside the room behind the door and their other interactions. Alex tells her that it is “for her.” Melinda looks at the decoration in shock. 
There is another flashback about the parents’ talk of abortion and adoption. A brief glimpse hints at Max having also been consumed by the door. The bodies of Marie, Benjamin, and John are shown again. 
Alex tells Melinda he loves her and wants to be with her forever. Melinda screams “No” and cries. She asks him how he could have done it and how he has done it. Alex rises from his wheelchair and pats her head. She kneels in front of him. He tells her not to worry, that “it is all in my head.”
A sequence of the cartoon and the axe follows. 
She calls him a monster. He repeatedly tells her: “It is in my head.” Finally, she asks what is in his head. He contests: “Only the two of us. Only you and me.”
The scene switches back to the lunch table with the entire family. The scene is the same as the first lunch scene. Benjamin returns from the bathroom. Melinda and Alex smile at each other knowingly while the others stare at them. Finally, Alex says: “For me, there are only the two of us.” The movie ends with a shot of his eyes and the words “for” and “ever.”