Room (2015)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Room (2015)

I sometimes ask myself why I would knowingly choose to watch an emotionally crushing horror movie such as this (and it is definitely a horror movie).  The answer is probably that Brie Larson won the Best Actress Oscar, I liked her in Short Term 12, and I didn’t look at the plot description when I placed this in my queue.  But I’m glad that I did, as painful and affecting as it was.  Larson plays a woman who has been kidnapped and locked in a small garden shed, kept as a sex slave by an evil Ohio loser for seven years; she’s had a son, played by Jacob Tremblay, and he is now 5 years old and has only known the shed (which they call “Room”) as his entire world; the outer world he knows just through TV and it is not treated as real.  Their life is seriously horrible but as it is all that Jack knows, he accepts it and even cherishes it.  He does not dream of escape as “Ma” (Larson) does.  The film makes you wonder how he (or they) would cope if escape really did come true, the effects of this kind of sheltered existence on them, and the severe trauma of it all.  It is all so devastating and executed with nary a hint of falseness in the acting by all involved.  Watch it.