Room Review: How the 2015 Film Compares to the Room Book

Room book vs. movie: how the 2015 film adapts the novel

Emma Donoghue published Room on August 6, 2010, and it went on to a Booker Prize shortlist, a place on the New York Times best-seller list and a run of other nominations. Her narrator is Jack, a boy who turns five in a single-room outbuilding where he lives with his mother. The place is called Room, and for Jack it is the entire world. The two are prisoners of a man the boy knows only as Old Nick.

Adapting that for the screen looks close to impossible. A book told through a five-year-old's voice depends on what he misunderstands, and a camera cannot misunderstand anything. Donoghue wrote the screenplay herself and worked with director Lenny Abrahamson, who shaped the project into a film that premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on September 4, 2015, and reached US theaters in the fall of that year from A24.

The strongest decision is the simplest one: the film trusts Jack. Narration is used in a handful of places, and the rest of the time the camera stays at a child's height and lets objects feel enormous. A skylight becomes the sky, a wardrobe becomes a bedroom, and ordinary furniture takes on the weight of a whole landscape. Anyone who loved the Room book for that sealed perspective will recognize it at once.

The idea came to Donoghue after she heard about a five-year-old boy in the Fritzl case, and she set the story in an invented place with invented people. Her choice to filter the whole thing through a child's eyes is what lifted the book beyond a thriller about captivity. The novel was also adapted for the stage, and Donoghue's own play premiered on May 10, 2017 at the Theatre Royal Stratford East.

The cast is almost entirely the two leads. Joan Allen, William H. Macy, Sean Bridgers as Old Nick and Tom McCamus appear in supporting roles, but the picture is a duet. It ran 118 minutes and earned four Oscar nominations at the 88th Academy Awards, among them Best Picture and Best Director for Abrahamson, with Larson winning Best Actress.

Jacob Tremblay as Jack

Child performers in dark material are often the weak link. Tremblay is not. When Jack sees the sky for the first time, the performance is raw and unforced: wonder, then confusion, then an urge to hide. His anger and fear are never played for cuteness, and not once does he annoy the viewer in a way the story does not intend.

What makes the difficult task of the role work is range. Jack has to go from a boy who talks to the furniture to a boy who must run for his life, and then from a boy who understands only one room to one who must learn to share a house with strangers. Tremblay moves through all of it without a false beat.

Brie Larson as Ma

Larson's job is the reverse of Tremblay's. She has to hide things from Jack and still show them to the audience. In the book, Jack often misses the signs of how much his mother is hiding, since he is five. The film solves that by watching Ma's face whenever her back is turned to Jack. The performance lives in those seconds, in the expressions she hides from her son and cannot hide from the camera.

The chemistry between the two is the film's backbone. Their scenes feel like routine, with the games, songs and bedtime rituals of two people who have made a life out of very little. That ease makes the second half hit harder, because the audience has already learned what it would cost to lose it.

What the movie adds and what it trims

By giving the audience Ma's inner life, the film gains a second emotional layer. A reader of the novel experiences her through the gaps in Jack's attention. A viewer of the film gets both at once, the boy's wonder and the mother's fear, and the effect is closer to dramatic irony than the book allows.

The most visible trim concerns breastfeeding. In the novel, Jack still nurses, and the habit is the physical sign of how close he and his mother have become. It is also what shocks people when they enter the outside world. The film shows it once inside Room and returns to it only when Ma tells Jack her milk has dried up. For a plot point the book treats as important, the film gives it far less room, and a viewer who knows the novel may feel the omission.

Joan Allen, as Ma's mother Nancy, and William H. Macy, as her father Robert, give the outside world its first faces, and their scenes show a family that loves her and cannot find the words. Those scenes are brief, but they do the job the novel gives pages to: they show that rescue does not repair anything on its own.

The second half also moves fast. Once Jack and Ma leave, the film moves through adjustment, family tension and public attention in a compressed span. Donoghue has said the second half was the harder one to shape because the world gets wider and a screenwriter has to choose what to show. The choice is defensible, though the book's slower approach to the aftermath earns more of its closing notes.

Room at a glance

Awards as listed for the novel and for the film at the 88th Academy Awards.

Room review: the verdict

Room works because it respects the Room book without chaining itself to it. The premise of a mother and son held captive could easily have tipped into exploitation. In Abrahamson's hands the horror sits beneath the surface, and the story stays focused on how a mother gives her child a world and then has to take that world apart.

Its flaws are small and specific: a thin treatment of an important bodily detail and a final stretch that wants more room. Neither dents what the film delivers. It manages to be harrowing without being punishing, and moving without begging for tears.

The shape of the story matters here. The first half is a claustrophobic study of routine, in which a mother invents games, chores and rules so that her son has a childhood, and in which the audience slowly grasps how much she has built to protect him. The second half is the harder test, because the escape does not end the story. Everything Jack knew is suddenly wrong, and everything Ma suppressed comes up at last. A weaker film would have stopped at the rescue. Room treats it as the midpoint.

That structure is why the Room book has lasted. It is not a puzzle about how the captors were caught. It is a story about what happens in a mind that has been taught one reality and then has to learn another, and about a mother who must stop being a whole world to her child and start being a parent in a crowded one.

Brie Larson won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama for the role, and the Oscar followed. The performance is quiet in the first half and raw in the second, and it earns both prizes. The film keeps the cruelest details of the captivity at the edge of the frame, which lets Tremblay carry a child's point of view without carrying the full horror.

Read the novel first if the premise draws you in, because Jack's voice is its own pleasure. If the book is already on the shelf, the film is a worthy companion to it, not a substitute, and Tremblay and Larson are good enough to justify the ticket alone.

Sources

• Room (2015 film), Wikipedia — cast, crew and release details
• Room (novel), Wikipedia — the source novel by Emma Donoghue