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.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

This guy’s armed with a hairdryer.

An Innocent Man (1989) (SPOILERS) Was it a chicken-and-egg thing with Tom Selleck and movies? Did he consistently end up in ropey pictures because other, bigger big-screen stars had first dibs on the good stuff? Or was it because he was a resolutely small-screen guy with limited range and zero good taste? Selleck had about half-a-dozen cinema outings during the 1980s, one of which, the very TV, very Touchstone Three Men and a Baby was a hit, but couldn’t be put wholly down to him. The final one was An Innocent Man , where he attempted to show some grit and mettle, as nice-guy Tom is framed and has to get tough to survive. Unfortunately, it’s another big-screen TV movie.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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