ROOM- A Review (ish)

A movie that a lot of us need but some of us will still be ungrateful and narrow the whole beauty of it down to one statement, ‘it was slow’.

Room, a work of art by Lenny Abrahamson, enacted gorgeously by Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay, is a sheer and crude metaphor of our life and how we belittle it each passing day. Joy as played by Brie and Jack as played by Jacob, are a pair of mother and son, held hostage in a shed that they call room.

Brie was kidnapped at the age of 17 by a man referred to as Old Nick in the film, who is also her rapist. Said rapes lead to the birth of Jack who is directly shown as a 5 year old in the beginning of the movie. Joy has been in the room for 7 years and Jack, who was born after the first two years, has lived there practically his whole life. That’s home for him. He watches TV, considers furniture and the egg-shell snakes to be his friends and his Ma is the most significant one because, well, she’s the only other human there.

He narrates his life in bits and pieces in which he mentions what he considers real and what not, based on what his mother has told him about things. One day, she decides that enough is enough and starts to convince her son that things like trees and oceans and every other person in TV are real but Jack has a hard time believing it all. It overwhelms him and his mother but both of them come around and start to plot an escape plan. After training her son a little bit and multiple tantrums later, Jack manages to escape and get the police to rescue his mother as well.

The movie connects to you so well that the minute both of them are outside, you start to breathe and think about all the things that they can do now. Even as a helpless audience, you start imagining how they would be feeling so much better now. Of course, the story then follows their coping mechanisms and that’s where we are reminded that even in a better place, we are meant to suffer one way or another. Here, you see Joy trying to come to grips with the thought that her friends and family were doing just fine without her or that people definitely forgot about her existence after a year or so when they had no sign of her. Jack tries to get a hold of the world around him feeling shy but still trying to open up bit by bit but an incident with his mom terrifies him because she attempts suicide as denial did not suit her well, however, she gets better, because don’t we all at some point?

That was the story. Now this is what I think about it.

I think that in a literal sense, it was brilliant but if you put it under the metaphor microscope, it simply takes it to another level. Old Nick is a representation of our fears and obstacles that we give into and satisfy because we are too afraid to do anything otherwise. The room is a dark space created because of our fear where we are held hostage for as long as we allow it.

Joy tries to escape before Jack was born, but she was not clever enough and fear grabbed her wrist, broke it and grew stronger in her eyes, seeped deep in her soul. Jack represents a ray of hope. Hope that gives us strength and helps us. It does quiver and it is not always as strong but if we have faith in the concept of hope, hope gets stronger. If we need hope, hope also needs us. In a way, hope is fueled by humans and vice versa. If the world stopped hoping, it would be so reckless and hurtful and I am sure nobody wants to be there when that happens. So Jack, being her hope, helps her out even if he is scared. He helps her stay alive and comes out growing himself.

To think that such a trauma would leave this boy weak and paranoid his whole life but the opposite happens when he mentions in one of his narrations that

“When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I'm five; I know everything.”

This quote alone expresses the idea that this is the child who will take trauma by the collar and make it his strength. When he asks her Ma if he could visit the room one last time, his mom is skeptical but he is so brave.

As an adult it is harder to let go of things because the world is magnified, but as a kid, the world is far, large and ultimate.

They return to the room under police supervision and only Jack has guts enough to walk in and explore all that is not there anymore. That made me think how Jack was fearless because it was just his old life and not torture because he didn’t know better. But for Joy, it was pure hell. Funny how the same setting can be so different for two people. However, she does say bye to the room, when Jack asks her to like he did and in that last moment, I think she realized that life was the worst here, but the room kept them safe somehow. With that, there is closure.

We tend to succumb to our fears and we tend to think, 'this is just who we are', after our attempts to get out of there fail; but when we keep trying, we are set free. There is still so much resistance when we try to fall out of our old ways and try to walk on a new path but we must not befriend denial on our way there.

Our bad times are our demons for a while but once we accept them and overcome them, they turn into nostalgia. Keep walking and keep chasing a better place. Your will is your strongest suit.

Remember,

"Mind over matter; if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter."

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