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The Movie

Both versions of Room make Jack’s age a major point. As both iterations start, he’s just celebrated his fifth birthday; Old Nick finds out, and Jack wakes up one morning to find a new R/C truck waiting for him. The movie adaptation of Room frames this in a revelatory way: Jack wakes up, looks off-screen, and we see his reaction shot. When we reveal the R/C truck, it’s sitting on the tiny kitchen table in the foreground, just barely in focus. Our attention, though, is on Ma. She’s looking at Jack, not at the truck - she knows he sees it - and the expression on her face is one of unhappy resignation.

In that moment, actress Brie Larson communicates notes of the Ma character that were left to implication in the novel and unexplored thus far in the film, with resentment toward Jack for his own species of ignorant contentedness in Room (and resentment toward herself for enabling it) being a primary driver. Ma is physically protective of Jack in both iterations of the story, but this stretch of the film alludes to subtle shadings of motivation for that protection. It’s not out of line to suggest that the escape plan Ma hatches, shortly after the unveiling of the gift, is derived in part from that resentment.

It’s a powerfully ambiguous moment, at any rate, that shot of the R/C car with Ma sitting behind it, and the movie adaptation of Room flips the script on effectiveness: the portion of the film taking place in Room is something of a masterstroke in camera placement and production design, while the second half gives back much of the novel’s perceptiveness about worldview. It’s pretty surprising how closely the movie hews to the book, and yet how similar sequences wear very differently on screen.

That first half, though, is just about unimpeachable. One of the biggest obstacles of this adaptation had to have been interpreting what is narrated to us in written form as a limitless world in a concrete, very limited visual sense. What the movie’s director Lenny Abrahamson and cinematographer Danny Cohen have done is utilize focus, exposure, and point of view to deny us a definitive sense of Room’s scope and size for as long as possible. Given that the set (and Room itself) is only about ten feet by ten feet in size, they succeed to a remarkable degree. This direction is paired with Jacob Tremblay’s voiceover, narrating Jack’s perception of Room and the world in several passages that are lifted almost directly from the novel.

The elliptical nature of this narration not only works better than you’d expect, but it actually acquits itself more comfortably in the cinematic sense than it does in the written sense. Witness the passage of a normal day in the Room life of Ma and Jack - a breakfast of counting cereal pieces, physical exercise of going from one side of Room to the other, of jumping up and down and screaming up at Room’s skylight, which provides the sole source of sunlight. This is very loyal in a strict sense to the book, but it’s stunning how Abrahamson manipulates our perception of space and re-contextualizes Room according to each activity, while also never trying to hide what a limited space we’re working with.

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