It can't really be Room if Door's open.

Room

(2015)

(SPOILERS) Perhaps predictably, the least of the Best Picture Oscar nominees in terms of box office take turns out to be one the best. It would be spurious to get into a debate over the chalk-and-cheese merits of Room versus Mad Max: Fury Road, as both exhibit an exemplary standard of filmmaking craft. Room has been rightly recognised for Brie Larson’s invested, dedicated performance (as affecting, if not more so, than her turn in Short Term 12), but equally laudable are young Jacob Tremblay (how he didn’t earn a supporting actor nomination is beyond me) and director Lenny Abrahamson.

About the only thing Room has in common with Abrahamson’s previous film, Frank, is the difficulty of getting inside the (papier-mâché or otherwise) head of its secondary protagonist. Larson’s Joy, that is (and, respectively, Michael Fassbender’s Frank). She has been abducted and imprisoned in a 10-foot-square, soundproofed garden shed, routinely raped by her captor over a period of seven years, her light and salvation the five-year-old son she would do anything to protect. There’s no articulating her resulting emotional state, and wisely Abrahamson doesn’t try.

An apt scene finds the reunited Joy flaring up at her mother Nancy (Joan Allen), unable and unwilling to relate her feelings and experiences. She believes, possibly rightly, possibly not, that Nancy won’t be able to cope. Later, a touching moment finds Nancy silently processing as Jack (Tremblay) matter-of-factly and devastatingly explains how he would retire to the closet when Old Nick (Sean Bridgers) visited Joy. While Jack, shielded from trauma during his years in Room, is able to adapt to this vast new world, Joy faces a new kind of nightmare, one in which she holds no hope of being understood.

Escape is no release. She finds herself in a different kind of prison, best illustrated by a television interview in which Wendy Crewson’s hostess assassinates her with understanding. Ruthlessly, but using the same sympathetic tones, she repositions Joy as the guilty party for failing to persuade Old Nick to give Jack up for adoption. In due course, we leave mother and son on a telling note as, revisiting Room at his request, Jack discovers it to be impossibly small and absent of the warmth and comfort it hitherto held; it’s no longer the whole world, or Jack’s Wonderland. While he simply loses all interest, Joy spends her time there just wanting to leave; she may say goodbye to Room with Jack, but she doesn’t have his closure.

Abrahamson’s direction is extraordinarily intimate and empathic. Within Room, he enables us, via Danny Cohen’s cinematography, to experience the meagre surroundings through Jack’s eyes: the entirety of existence in a microcosm (contrastingly, when we see Room from Joy’s perspective it is a place of claustrophobia, entombment and isolation). Yet the progression from there, through Jack’s daring escape into an uncanny environment of un-Room exteriors, unfamiliar faces, hospital floors, grandparents, and pets, is one that elicits fear, bewilderment and then, by incremental turns, adaptation and integration. Notably, the shed housing Room is revealed as a totally unremarkable garden shed in a totally unremarkable neighbourhood (not unlike the exterior of the house in the Elisabeth Fritzl case, the inspiration for Room).

Tremblay’s performance is entirely natural and immediate, while Larson’s is simply heart-breaking. Allen is hugely sympathetic as the mother (the haircut scene is quite wonderful). Tom McCamus (I can only assume the someone on the production was an Orphan Black fan, as they share several cast members, including Amanda Brugel’s hero cop and Joe Pingue’s useless one), slightly dishevelled and boggle-eyed, initially feeds on our, and Joy and Jack’s, uncertainty as Nancy’s boyfriend Leo, yet proves to be the sensitive rock where ex-Robert (William H Macy) cannot even bear to lay eyes upon his grandson.

Stephen Rennick, Abrahamson’s regular composer, provides a low key, evocative piano score, one that reminded me a little of Jon Brion’s work on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I haven’t mentioned Emma Donoghue’s screenplay, adapted from her 2010 novel. She is acutely insightful throughout, avoiding spelling things out or overstatement. Although, if I were to raise a minor niggle, the faux-pint-sized philosophy Jack pronounces as narrator is occasionally a little florid, more suited to gilded affairs such as The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet or Extraordinarily Loud and Incredibly Close than Abrahamson’s immersive, heightened-yet-simultaneously-grounded realism. Nevertheless, his film is a powerful, perceptive, wholly immersive experience, one that avoids both sensationalism and tying a bow around its fraught subject matter.

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Duffy. That old tangerine hipster.

Duffy (1968) (SPOILERS) It’s appropriate that James Coburn’s title character is repeatedly referred to as an old hipster in Robert Parrish’s movie, as that seemed to be precisely the niche Coburn was carving out for himself in the mid to late 60s, no sooner had Our Man Flint made him a star. He could be found partaking in jaundiced commentary on sexual liberation in Candy, falling headlong into counter culture in The President’s Analyst , and leading it in Duffy . He might have been two decades older than its primary adherents, but he was, to repeat an oft-used phrase here, very groovy. If only Duffy were too.

You know what I sometimes wish? I sometimes wish I were ordinary like you. Ordinary and dead like all the others.

Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) (SPOILERS) Bryan Forbes’ adaptation of Mark McShane’s 1961’s novel has been much acclaimed. It boasts a distinctive storyline and effective performances from its leads, accompanied by effective black-and-white cinematography from Gerry Turpin and a suitably atmospheric score from John Barry. I’m not sure Forbes makes the most of the material, however, as he underlines Séance on a Wet Afternoon ’s inherently theatrical qualities at the expense of its filmic potential.

Mondo bizarro. No offence man, but you’re in way over your head.

The X-Files 8.7: Via Negativa I wasn’t as down on the last couple of seasons of The X-Files as most seemed to be. For me, the mythology arc walked off a cliff somewhere around the first movie, with only the occasional glimmer of something worthwhile after that. So the fact that the show was tripping over itself with super soldiers and Mulder’s abduction/his and Scully’s baby (although we all now know it wasn’t, sheesh ), anything to stretch itself beyond breaking point in the vain hope viewers would carry on dangling, didn’t really make much odds. Of course, it finally snapped with the wretched main arc when the show returned, although the writing was truly on the wall with Season 9 finale The Truth . For the most part, though, I found 8 and 9 more watchable than, say 5 or 7. They came up with their fair share of engaging standalones, one of which I remembered to be Via Negativa .

A ship is the finest nursery in the world.

A High Wind in Jamaica (1965) (SPOILERS) An odd one, this, as if Disney were remaking The Swiss Family Robinson for adults. One might perhaps have imagined the Mouse House producing it during their “Dark Disney” phase. But even then, toned down. After all, kids kidnapped by pirates sounds like an evergreen premise for boy’s own adventuring (more girl’s own here). The reality of Alexander Mackendrick’s film is decidedly antithetical to that; there’s a lingering feeling, despite A High Wind in Jamaica ’s pirates largely observing their distance, that things could turn rather nasty (and indeed, if Richard Hughes’ 1929 novel had been followed to the letter, they would have more explicitly).

You have done well to keep so much hair, when so many’s after it.

Jeremiah Johnson (1972) (SPOILERS) Hitherto, I was most familiar with Jeremiah Johnson in the form of a popular animated gif of beardy Robert Redford smiling and nodding in slow zoom close up (a moment that is every bit as cheesy in the film as it is in the gif). For whatever reason, I hadn’t mustered the enthusiasm to check out the 1970s’ The Revenant until now (well, beard-wise, at any rate). It’s easy to distinguish the different personalities at work in the movie. The John Milius one – the (mythic) man against the mythic landscape; the likeably accentuated, semi-poetic dialogue – versus the more naturalistic approach favoured by director Sydney Pollack and star Redford. The fusion of the two makes for a very watchable, if undeniably languorous picture. It was evidently an influence on Dances with Wolves in some respects, although that Best Picture Oscar winner is at greater pains to summon a more sensitive portrayal of Native Americans (and thus, perversely, at times a more patr

My Doggett would have called that crazy.

The X-Files 9.4: 4-D I get the impression no one much liked Agent Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish), but I felt, for all the sub-Counsellor Troi, empath twiddling that dogged her characterisation, she was a mostly positive addition to the series’ last two years (of its main run). Undoubtedly, pairing her with Doggett, in anticipation of Gillian Anderson exiting just as David Duchovny had – you rewatch these seasons and you wonder where her head was at in hanging on – made for aggressively facile gender-swapped conflict positions on any given assignment. And generally, I’d have been more interested in seeing how two individuals sympathetic to the cause – her and Mulder – might have got on. Nevertheless, in an episode like 4-D you get her character, and Doggett’s, at probably their best mutual showing.

You’re a disgrace, sir... Weren’t you at Harrow?

Our Man in Marrakesh aka Bang! Bang! You’re Dead (1966) (SPOILERS) I hadn’t seen this one in more than three decades, and I had in mind that it was a decent spy spoof, well populated with a selection of stalwart British character actors in supporting roles. Well, I had the last bit right. I wasn’t aware this came from the stable of producer Harry Alan Towers, less still of his pedigree, or lack thereof, as a sort of British Roger Corman (he tried his hand at Star Wars with The Shape of Things to Come and Conan the Barbarian with Gor , for example). More legitimately, if you wish to call it that, he was responsible for the Christopher Lee Fu Manchu flicks. Our Man in Marrakesh – riffing overtly on Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana in title – seems to have in mind the then popular spy genre and its burgeoning spoofs, but it’s unsure which it is; too lightweight to work as a thriller and too light on laughs to elicit a chuckle.

The best thing in the world for the inside of a man or a woman is the outside of a horse.

Marnie (1964) (SPOILERS) Hitch in a creative ditch. If you’ve read my Vertigo review, you’ll know I admired rather than really liked the picture many fete as his greatest work. Marnie is, in many ways, a redux, in the way De Palma kept repeating himself in the early 80s only significantly less delirious and… well, compelling. While Marnie succeeds in commanding the attention fitfully, it’s usually for the wrong reasons. And Hitch, digging his heels in as he strives to fashion a star against public disinterest – he failed to persuade Grace Kelly out of retirement for Marnie Rutland – comes entirely adrift with his leads.

I tell you, it saw me! The hanged man’s asphyx saw me!

The Asphyx (1972) (SPOILERS) There was such a welter of British horror from the mid 60s to mid 70s, even leaving aside the Hammers and Amicuses, that it’s easy to lose track of them in the shuffle. This one, the sole directorial effort of Peter Newbrook (a cameraman for David Lean, then a cinematographer), has a strong premise and a decent cast, but it stumbles somewhat when it comes to taking that premise any place interesting. On the plus side, it largely eschews the grue. On the minus, directing clearly wasn’t Newbrook’s forte, and even aided by industry stalwart cinematographer Freddie Young (also a go-to for Lean), The Aspyhx is stylistically rather flat.

Just wait. They’ll start listing side effects like the credits at the end of a movie.

Contagion (2011) (SPOILERS) The plandemic saw Contagion ’s stock soar, which isn’t something that happens too often to a Steven Soderbergh movie. His ostensibly liberal outlook has hitherto found him on the side of the little people (class action suits) and interrogating the drugs trade while scrupulously avoiding institutional connivance (unless it’s Mexican institutional connivance). More recently, The Laundromat ’s Panama Papers puff piece fell fall flat on its face in attempting broad, knowing satire (in some respects, this is curious, as The Informant! is one of Soderbergh’s better-judged films, perhaps because it makes no bones about its maker’s indifference towards its characters). There’s no dilution involved with Contagion , however. It amounts to a bare-faced propaganda piece, serving to emphasise that the indie-minded director is Hollywood establishment through and through. This is a picture that can comfortably sit alongside any given Tinseltown handwringing over the Wa

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