Room is a film about a shed. That is the whole trick of it, and Lenny Abrahamson never lets you forget it. The 2015 survival psychological drama runs 118 minutes, and for its first half you never leave the enclosure that Joy Newsome and her five-year-old son Jack call home. They sleep in it, eat in it, wash in it. Their only light comes through a single skylight.
Emma Donoghue wrote the screenplay from her own 2010 novel, and she kept the story locked to Jack’s point of view. That choice is what separates Room from every other captivity drama. We do not watch a victim suffer. We watch a child discover that his entire universe is a lie, and then discover the universe that replaced it.
The film premiered at the 42nd Telluride Film Festival on September 4, 2015. It screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the People’s Choice Award. A24 gave it a limited run in the United States on October 16, 2015, then went wide on January 22, 2016.
Trailer, via A24.
Joy Newsome and the shed in Akron
The setup is as grim as it sounds. Joy, played by Brie Larson, is 24. She was abducted seven years before the film opens. Jack, played by Jacob Tremblay, was born in captivity. His biological father is the man they call Old Nick, played by Sean Bridgers, who routinely rapes Joy while Jack sleeps in the closet.
Jack does not know any of this. He thinks Room is the world. He thinks the television shows him pictures of a place that does not exist. Joy has told him so, and she has told him so on purpose, because the truth would break him.
That is the film’s cruelest engine. Joy’s love for her son requires her to lie to him, and the lie has to be elaborate and total. She maintains a fiction for five years while her own body fails. She suffers from malnutrition and depression. Old Nick tells her he has lost his job and may not be able to afford their supplies.
Then Jack gets curious. He climbs out of the closet while Old Nick is asleep in bed with Joy. Joy slaps Old Nick away. As punishment, he cuts their heat and power.
The escape, and what it costs
What follows is the sequence the film is built around, and it works because Donoghue refuses to make it clean. Joy first tries to get Jack out by having him fake a fever, hoping Old Nick will take him to a hospital. Old Nick just promises to bring antibiotics. The plan dies.
So Joy wraps Jack in a rug and tells him to pretend he is dead. She tells him to run to the first person he sees. Old Nick falls for it. He puts the boy in the back of his pickup truck and drives through a residential neighborhood. Jack, stunned by his first look at the outside world, jumps from the truck and gets the attention of a passerby. Old Nick tries to drag him back and fails, then flees. The police arrive and rescue Jack.
Here is the part that matters most. The escape is not the ending. It is the midpoint, and the film knows it.
Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay
Larson won the part after an associate of Abrahamson suggested he watch her in Short Term 12. She consulted a trauma expert and a nutritionist. She went on a restrictive diet and avoided sunlight. She has said she saw Room less as a crime story and more as “a story of love and freedom and perseverance and what it feels like to grow up and become your own person.”
That reading is correct, and it is why the second half of the film holds up. The film is not about the shed. It is about what the shed did to two people and what happens when you take them out of it.
Tremblay was seven when he was cast, from Vancouver. The filmmakers considered dozens of child actors for Jack. He has said the role was not hard “because I was playing a happy child” who did not understand the sinister nature of Room. He was too young to read the whole screenplay, so each scene was explained to him one by one. He wore a wig made from human hair.
The production gave Larson and Tremblay more than three weeks together before shooting, to build what Joan Allen called a “very tight, obviously critical, close relationship.” The Room scenes were shot over five weeks.
Joan Allen, Tom McCamus and the second half
Allen plays Nancy, Joy’s mother. She arrived in Toronto later than the leads and met Tremblay, but she has noted the deliberate distance: “we didn’t want him to become too familiar with me because that’s not what the story is.” For her own preparation she did not consult real mothers of kidnapped children. She thought back to a moment in a mall when her daughter was little and she looked around and, in a flash, the girl was gone.
Tom McCamus auditioned for Old Nick before being cast as Leo. William H. Macy plays Robert. The cast also includes Cas Anvar as Dr. Mittal, Amanda Brugel as Officer Parker, Wendy Crewson as a talk show hostess, Joe Pingue as Officer Grabowski, and Matt Gordon as Doug.
Donoghue has said the actors improvised lines that produced “speech patterns more natural-sounding than I could have written, and produced some brilliant new lines that ended up in the film.” You can feel that in the second half, where the dialogue loosens and the film stops being a thriller and starts being something closer to a family study.
The set at Pinewood Toronto Studios
Room was a co-production of Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States. It was shot in Toronto, with the set built at Pinewood Toronto Studios. The crew designed each part of the set to be removable, so they could pull walls out and get the camera where it needed to go.
That is not trivia. The shed is the film’s central character, and the production treated it that way. The set is small enough to feel like a trap and detailed enough that you believe a boy could map every inch of it. When Jack finally sees a sky that goes on past the frame, the release is physical, not metaphorical.
What Room gets right
The film’s first half is close to flawless. It withholds, then reveals, then withholds again. It never lets Joy explain herself to the audience. It never lets Jack understand more than he should. The tension is domestic and constant, and it never tips into horror-movie mechanics.
The second half is messier. Once Jack is outside, the film has to build a new world in less than an hour, and some of that world is thin. That is a judgment about the film’s shape, not a finding from the source.
But the mess is honest, and that is the paper’s read, not a fact the film’s makers have stated. Room is not interested in tidy recovery. It is interested in the fact that freedom is disorienting and that a child raised in one room has to learn, at five, that everything he was taught was a kindness and a lie at the same time.
Larson carries the first half almost without dialogue, and Tremblay carries the second half almost without a script he could read. Neither performance reaches for sympathy. That restraint is the film’s best decision.
The numbers behind Room
- Title: Room
- Year: 2015
- Director: Lenny Abrahamson
- Writer: Emma Donoghue, from her 2010 novel
- Runtime: 118 minutes
- Genres: Drama, Thriller
- Tagline: “Love knows no boundaries.”
- Premiere: September 4, 2015, 42nd Telluride Film Festival
- US limited release: October 16, 2015
- Canada release: October 23, 2015
- UK and Ireland release: January 15, 2016
- US wide release: January 22, 2016
- Budget: $13 million
- Gross: $36.3 million
- Metacritic: 86/100
- Score: 8.6/10
Room against the standard captivity drama
Most films in this territory treat the room as a stage for suffering and the escape as a finish line. Room does the opposite. It treats the room as a home and the escape as the start of the hard part.
| Element | Room (2015) | The standard captivity drama |
|---|---|---|
| Point of view | Jack, age five | The adult held captive |
| Escape | Midpoint | Climax |
| Second half | Rebuilding a life outside | Usually absent |
| Central relationship | Mother and son | The two leads, held apart |
| Tone | Domestic, restrained | Thriller, escalating |
| Runtime | 118 minutes | Often longer |
The table explains why Room still holds up 11 years on. It is not a movie about a monster. Old Nick is barely a character. He is a job, a supply run, a threat behind a door.
The film is about what a parent will build to protect a child, and what happens when the structure collapses and the child has to live in the open.
Where this one lands
Room earns its 8.6 out of 10. Larson and Tremblay do the kind of work that makes a small film feel enormous, and Donoghue’s script refuses the easy version of the story at every turn.
The flaws are real, and they are this paper’s read rather than anything the source states. The back third reaches for a few scenes that spell out what the film had already shown, and some supporting characters never get enough room to breathe.
But the film’s central idea is durable. Jack spends five years believing that one room is the whole world, and then he spends the rest of the film learning that the world is bigger and stranger and not always kinder. Room does not pretend that is a happy ending. It just shows you what it costs, and it trusts you to feel it.
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