Kritiken

The movies can put a positive spin on anything... If The Martian is a friendly version of dark Ridley Scott sci-fi, Room domesticates repugnant horror with spiritual uplift... "Ma" becomes a stand-in for every young mother isolated by child care, chained by domestic servitude, and abused at night by a man who's out all day in a world she may never see again. This dismal parody of heterosexual coupling reinforces the idea that it's time to have families in some new way.

[After Ma and Jack escape,] Room becomes generic, diluted, almost like a Hallmark series with the troubled family trying to find footing in the chaos around them. The spatial control of the earlier part is stretched out, and the energy sapped from the original idea.

It's an incredibly moving and detailed work. By shunning melodrama to focus on physical and emotional minutiae, it's a film about the imperceptible struggles of getting through each dark day.

If eight-year-old Jacob Tremblay's performance captures, like bottled lightning, Jack's immediate responses to the momentary (augmented by voiceover reflections), Brie Larson's courageous turn is characterised by watchfulness. Ma's every word and action in captivity is geared to maintaining Jack's cheerfulness, safety and engagement in their dreary environment and monotonous existence.

In a way, the viewer's experience mirrors the boy's experience in the story, since the narrative guides us to the realization that Room is so much bigger and more resonant than we might have imagined. While it certainly touches on the darkest aspects of the adult world, in the end it's a fable which allows us to relive the innocence of childhood and reconnect with the resilience ofa parental bond

If Abrahamson makes the right call in letting [Tremblay's] untutored energy shine to the detriment of Donoghue's narrative structure, he also fumbles in amplifying the author's most distinctive stylistic conceit: Jack's dreamy and dramatically ironic voiceover narration, which sounds as naive to us as it sounds perfectly adult to him.

Everyone already knows that Lenny Abrahamson's tense, terrifying drama is about Brie Larson and her 5-year-old son imprisoned in a room by the man who abducted her many years ago. But what may not initially be clear is that this is a far more universal tale about parenting, about the bond not just between mother and child but also between child and setting. It's about the way that we latch on to the most unlikely things, and our very human tendency to invest them with all sorts of meaning.

Sadly, the incompetent direction from Abrahamson always gets in the way. Intrusive music cues, unnecessary slow zooms and hyperactive editing are constantly employed, as if Abrahamson thinks that it's his job to "trick out" a movie that's stuck in a room, rather than allow the claustrophobia to take hold. Nevertheless, these irksome errors are not what I will remember about Room in years to come. So as we see in the film itself, the power of selective imagination helps us all.

The less you know about the plot of Lenny Abrahamson's Room before seeing it, the more its twists will hit. Suffice it to say that the film is one of the year's revelations, ramping up suspense to hard-to-bear levels but finding its core in an emotionally hammering depiction of the possibility of hope surviving in the most arid of circumstances, even as it sets out the isolation of healing trauma amid those unable to fathom its dark places.

Having previously made a film in which the title character's head is never seen (Frank), Abrahamson would seem to be a solid choice for a story with a severely constricted view. For some reason, however, he largely squanders the location's claustrophobic potential, shooting Room more or less like any other room. (The film's second half, which expands the scope considerably, is stronger.)

Room deserves the term "harrowing." It is harrowing in its quiet, in its logic, in its patience. It is harrowing in its setting. It is harrowing in the fact that it forces you to imagine what it would be like, and, even more upsetting, how would YOU handle it? Empathy isn't just "Oh my God, I feel so bad for that person." It's "I am forced into that person's shoes, and it fills me with worry and dread, because I wonder how I would fare in similar circumstances.

The bond between mother and son is a powerful, magnetic one, and Room relies on it for its undeniable effectiveness and reassuring sentiment, but that path of least resistance is heading away from a much thornier approach.