Split almost perfectly down its center, Lenny Abrahamson‘s Room, based on the bestselling novel by Emma Donoghue, is equal parts heart-stopping thriller and emotionally visceral drama. Few films are as effectively stomach-churning while sustaining emotional connectedness in so compelling a manner. This is what is possible when a novel is perfectly translated to screen and, like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl screenplay adaptation last year, holds up a keen argument for authors adapting their own work. A far cry from Abrahamson’s decidedly weirder film entry of last year, Frank, Room is an insular (literally) account of a young woman, Ma (Brie Larson, being amazing), doing her best to raise her five-year-old son Jack (Jacob Tremblay, almost stealing the show) in the tiny one-room shack where they are held captive. Pushed to her breaking point and fearing for her son’s safety, Ma is finally driven to enact a harrowing plan to help her son escape and experience the world outside of “room.”

Abrahamson spends the film’s first act focused on the intricacies of life in a tiny room and the inventive and loving ways Ma has devised to keep her son healthy and happy. She cooks him meals on a hot plate, breastfeeds him for added sustenance, and leads him through yoga and running exercises around the room. Through expert use of Jack’s first person narrative scattered throughout the film, we see “room” through his five-year-old eyes. The toilet, the chairs, the television and the wardrobe he often sleeps in all take on distinct and special characteristics as they make up the entirety of Jack’s universe and everything he’s ever known. But most important of all is Ma, and the bond between mother and son is strong and almost feral.

In watching their lives it becomes clear that in the seven years Ma has spent in “room,” and the five that Jack has, a routine has developed. Each night Ma tucks Jack away into the wardrobe, doing her best to shelter him from her captor, Old Nick (Sean Bridgers), when he makes his nightly visit to Ma to take advantage of her. Jack knows the drill, but curiosity gets the better of him one night and he climbs out to have a look at the only other human being he’s ever seen. Ma awakes to find Nick talking to Jack and reacts with a fierce protectiveness. She pays the price and decides once and for all something must be done.

The plan for escape in the film is equal in anxiety to any great heist film, more so because it’s experienced mostly through Jack’s scared understanding of what he is doing. The entire plan rests on him to act, but more than that it relies on him accepting this new truth his mother is revealing to him that there is an entire universe outside of “room” and he needs to choose to leave everything he knows and loves, including his mother. There isn’t an audience alive that won’t be gripping their armrests as the escape scene plays out, and without revealing too much about how the film continues, suffice it to say that Ma and Jack face an entirely new set of demons once they are out in the real world.

The intimate nature of the narrative is what especially allows for the emotional connection one feels for Ma and Jack. They represent the fear everyone shares at being violated so profoundly by another human. One can’t help but imagine what they would attempt or feel in a similar situation. How can anyone prepare for such a thing? Equally so, how can we predict the physical and emotional effects and how they will manifest in the years following such trauma? Jack shows us the resilient nature of children in the way he begins to accept the new world he is experiencing, while Ma is haunted by the world she knew before her kidnapping and how it can never be the same. And both have to get used to a world full of judgment and expectation and an inability to truly understand their experience.

Obviously the film’s writing is what sets it up for success, but Larson and Tremblay’s performances are what elevate this film to perfection and sure-fire award candidacy. Larson manages to juggle portraying an abused woman, a fierce mother, and a PTSD-afflicted young woman who wasn’t allowed to complete her own childhood. Tremblay, and his perfect little lips, expresses the entire range of a five-year-old: wonder, excitement, stubbornness, fear, and child-like unadulterated love. His courage is astounding and the chemistry between Larson and himself is palpable.

There are a few unexplored story threads in the second half that leave us wanting, most especially between Ma and her father played by William H. Macy. And, of course, it’s difficult for there to be a truly satisfying stopping point to the film, as one becomes so attached and invested in the characters it’s natural to wish we could see how their entire lives play out. The film’s lens stays close on its subjects, contributing to the claustrophobic but intimate relationship of its lead characters. The cinematography is a wash of blue and green but manages not to be depressing with its drab scheme.

Room is certainly among the year’s essential viewing and while some may be quick to label it a “difficult watch,” such a description neglects the ultimately life-affirming and passionately affecting story told. Abrahamson has done an amazing job in inviting viewers to consider one of those potentialities no one likes to think about, engaging us with a deeply personal and fantastically told tale of survival and familial bond.

Lenny Abrahamson‘s Room, adapted by Emma Donoghue from her own novel, is an imaginative examination of parent-child dynamics that’s been garnering the Irish director wide praise. Also receiving her share of adulation is Brie Larson, who plays Ma, a single mother who lives confined in a little room with her son, Jack (Jacob Tremblay). “Room,” as they lovingly call their humble abode, is the only world Jack’s ever known, but Ma wants more for her son’s life and hatches a plan to deceive their captor and break out of Room and into the larger outside world.

Room‘s brilliance is all but undeniable. Emotional, urgent, unpredictable, sweet, frightening—the movie is super complex and deceptively simple, not to mention it harbors arguably Larson’s best performance yet. Tremblay matches his older co-star’s talent and, amazingly, acts as the film’s anchor at eight years old.

I spoke to Abrahamson about the film in a roundtable interview during his visit to San Francisco at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. Room is out now in select cities, opens in San Francisco tomorrow, October 23rd, and expands wide November 6th.

You’ve talked about a letter you wrote to Emma Donoghue and the pitfalls a director could face in adapting this story.
Lenny: I thought there were two opposite ways you could go wrong making this film. On one hand, you could make something terribly sentimental where you’re just button-pushing and manipulating the audience to fake emotion. In the other direction, if you go for tough, gritty, bleak and hardcore, you end up with something that’s a bit exploitative and doesn’t capture what the novel’s really about. It isn’t about incarceration. To tell the story as if it were about the incarceration is to tell the story on the terms the abuser sets; we’re telling the story on the terms the survivors set.

I also felt there would be a temptation—given that the novel is told from the point of view of the little boy—to try to find some device or trick or technique to directly copy that to film. Computer graphic techniques, ways to make more magical the things that Jack talks about—somehow externalizing the way the child is thinking. I thought, all that would do is distance the audience from what is the strongest aspect of this film, which is a sense of a real encounter with those characters. You trust an audience brings this empathetic tenderness to characters if they’re well shown, and that type of emotion is way more real and lasting than the shock or sentiment.

I had a wonderful experience with the film because I had not heard about the book or seen the trailer. I went in totally cold. When that pivotal moment comes halfway through the movie I thought, “Well, I guess the ending is coming soon.” I loved not knowing what was going to happen next. Is that the ideal way you’d like audiences to watch the film, knowing essentially nothing going in?
Lenny: Yeah! I think in an ideal world, everybody would walk into a theater without knowing anything about the movie they’re going to see. Obviously there are many reasons why we have to tell people a little bit about the film. Particularly in the case of Room, if all you knew was the very bare outline, you might think, “That sounds a little bit too tough for me.” In fact, what it is is a very uplifting and life-affirming film. To tell that to people is pretty important, I think. But you are still my ideal viewer. If I was Stalin and I could make people go and see my film, I wouldn’t tell them anything about the story! [laughs] Then the film gets to play with your expectations.

Some people mistake the movie’s setting as post-apocalyptic in the first half.
Lenny: One of the great things about cinema is, once a person buys a ticket to the theater, you now you’ve got them for a while. It’s not like TV where they have the remote in their hand. One of the great advantages of seeing a movie in a theater is that it allows the filmmaker a larger canvas to place you in the world at their own pace. There’s something about that opening that puts you in the head of the child. You wake up and you don’t learn anything he’s not bringing you. If at the beginning you really established what the world was and then went in, you’d have already created this external perspective.

What I wanted to do was tie you to the boy. You’re getting these hints that, in the world of his mother, there’s more tension and danger than he’s aware of. That’s really the condition of all parents and children. This is an extreme version of it so that you can really examine what parenthood is all about. Loving parents constantly present one face to their child, which is almost always confident and reassuring, trying to make things that are worrying to them not worrying to the children. In other words, there is an outside world and an inside world, and the inside world is the face you show to your child. Those are the kinds of little permeable barriers that we were really fascinated with. This is a film about being a child and having children and growing up. The rest of it is a way of unlocking some universal aspects of those things by picking this remarkable and unusual situation.

Brie’s career is really starting to catch fire. I think there’s a lot of warmth and intellect to her that makes her special. What makes her special to you?
Lenny: I think you said it. She started acting when she was seven. That process, that transition from who you are and into character, it’s like riding a bicycle to her because she’s done it so many times. She doesn’t have to think about it. What’s great about that is that she has a lightness of touch as an actor. She’s not walking around super intense on set, unable to make eye contact, desperate to keep in character for fear that if she steps out she’ll lose it. She has it so firmly in her grasp. That means, as a director, after you call cut, the person that comes back to you is ready to talk about what she’s just done, she’s ready to talk about alternatives. She’s not saying she can’t play it any other way because “this is how I feel it.” She can feel it lots of ways. She’s a shape-shifter in that way.

Sometimes we have a tendency to believe that the super-intense actors are the only ones who are deep. That’s absolutely not true. I don’t think I’ve seen a stronger lead performance for a long time than Brie in this film, and yet she manages to still participate in the overall conversation about the film. She’s very warm and very present. That’s very important because we’ve got a little boy on set who’s paired with her for so many scenes in the film. You can imagine if she was just flouncing off to her trailer when we called cut or if she didn’t want to play with him. You’d lose what makes that relationship special onscreen. She’s remarkable.

Cinematographer Danny Cohen is very talented. There are some clear cinematic challenges the first half of the film presents. What were some of the challenges the second half presented?
Lenny: That’s interesting. As soon as we got out of Room we missed it a bit, sort of like the characters in the film. In the second half I think the challenge was to over-express the largeness of the world. It’s really tempting to say, “Now we’re out of Room. Let’s have really wide shots.” We shot very naturally when we got out of Room. We don’t use super wide lenses or anything like that. As an audience, you’ve already been inside for 45 minutes. I wanted to say, the world as it is, without me exaggerating it, is pretty amazing. If I exaggerated, I’d be cheating. I wouldn’t be showing you something real. For me it’s always about making those little hints invisible to the audience. As soon as people think they’re being told something, it’s just less powerful.

The Room world is Jake’s normal world. Once you get into the outside world, how do you deal with how overwhelming that is for him? We did use some techniques. We were more likely to do some point-of-view stuff. If he’s sitting on Ma’s knee, we take shots from his point of view through her hair. The cutting style is a little more disjointed. His attention is on these details. Why can kids be irritating? Clearly, in this room, the focus is us talking. Come on, it’s obvious! A kid is just as interested in [some other little thing in the room]! You think, “Can’t you tell what’s important?” The answer is no—everything’s important if you’re a kid.

You’ve found success with this film. Does success worry you?
Lenny: Choice can be paralyzing as well as empowering. The answer for me is that I continue to pursue the things I’m interested in. The hope is that it’ll be easier to pursue now. I feel that some of the projects I’ve been developing for a while are big and challenging. That’s the hardest thing to make—big and challenging. Small and challenging is okay, big and mainstream is okay. Room was a very challenging film to make, and the fact that it worked shows that I can take difficult material and do something with it. That’s what I intend to do for the next few years.

There’s that interesting dynamic that develops later in the film where Ma almost becomes an older sister rather than a mother.
Lenny: It’s something that happens to everybody when they go back to their parents’ house. They go back to whatever teenage version of themselves they were and get grumpy. This is an extreme version of that because she’s literally been plucked out from there and when she comes back, she hasn’t moved on from that 17-year-old self. I felt that the best way of us feeling really worried for Jack was to feel that his mother isn’t this person that is there or him in this really nurturing way. She’s this older sister who’s irritating and clingy. We actually improvised a line that wasn’t in the film: As she’s dragging him out of her bedroom as he’s watching Dora the Explorer on his phone, she says, “Always in my room,” which is what an older sister would say.

A week has passed and I’m still right in the thick of the Mill Valley Film Festival, which so far has been the best I’ve attended to yet. The films have been mostly great and the vibe in Marin has stayed energetic (but not chaotic) since day one. I spent day seven, however, not in one of the festival’s designated theaters, but on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where I spoke to two directors whose films are wowing crowds at MVFF and are destined to be on myriad best-of-the-year lists for 2015.

Breaking Out

First up was a conversation with Room director Lenny Abrahamson, who the night before was presenting his film at MVFF with Brie Larson, who was receiving a Mill Valley Award. But he was a hair away from not making it to the event at all, he told me. “I was supposed to do the red carpet, present Brie with the award…everything,” the Irish filmmaker recalled. “There was an accident on the Golden Gate Bridge and we were stuck in traffic! I ran onstage in the middle of the Q&A.” Close call notwithstanding, the night went beautifully, with the typically receptive, inquisitive crowd of festivalgoers embracing the film fully, as have audiences across the country.

Based on Emma Donoghue’s best-selling novel of the same name (Donoghue adapted the story to screen herself), the movie follows the journey of a mother (Larson) and her son Jack (Jacob Tremblay), who plan to escape from Room, the only world Jack’s ever known and the tiny prison Ma’s been trapped in for years. Knowing nothing of the film going in, I had a fantastic experience as the story unfolded and surprised me several times before the end credits with thought-provoking revelations and unexpected narrative wrinkles. Larson gives perhaps her strongest performance yet (that’s saying something) and Tremblay’s no slouch, to put it lightly.

Abrahamson was tickled by the fact that I didn’t know anything about the film going in. “In an ideal world,” he said, “everybody would walk into the theater without knowing anything about the movie they’re going to see.” Our conversation (which you’ll find right here on WTI in its entirety next week) enrichened my viewpoints on the film and has me now eagerly waiting to watch it again, the filmmaker’s fresh insights in tow.

Bay Area Son Returns

Cary Joji Fukunaga‘s career is blossoming at a startling rate. After directing just a handful of projects, he’s become one of the most talked-about young directors in the game right now. The quality of his work speaks for itself and explains all the excitement: his first feature, Sin Nombre, won heaps of awards and praise on the awards circuit and with critics in 2009; his second, 2011’s Jane Eyre, again garnered him critical praise; and in 2014 he directed every episode of the gigantic hit series True Detective (Fukunaga declined a return to the series for season 2).

I met with Cary to talk about the film, which was a true pleasure (come back to Way Too Indie tomorrow to read our full conversation). Cary’s from Oakland, CA (an East Bay boy like me!). It’s always heartening to see someone from your neck of the woods make an impact in the film industry, and I predict we’ll be talking about Cary’s work for years to come. It was clear from talking to him that he’s a thinking man’s director.

Set in an unnamed West African country, the film charts the journey of Agu, a young boy who loses his family in a military raid on his village. Lost and grieving, he’s recruited by a roaming group of rebels led by Commandant (Idris Elba), a charismatic leader who turns Agu into an indoctrination pet project. Surreal, powerful, and visually breathtaking, Beasts is one of the best things I’ve seen all year and showcases Cary’s skills as both a writer and visual storyteller (for the film he acted as cinematographer for the first time in addition to his writer-director roles). Better yet, it’s available on Netflix tomorrow, October 16th. As I type this, Cary is heading to Mill Valley to present the film to lucky festivalgoers who are in for a soul-stirring treat.

A tug of war between great drama and schmaltzy pap, Lenny Abrahamson’s adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel Room comes perilously close to collapsing into a laughably maudlin film at times. Spending its first half entirely in the titular room (in actuality a shed), Ma (Brie Larson) and her 5-year-old son Jack (Jacob Tremblay) are being held hostage by a man they call Old Nick (Sean Bridgers); Old Nick kidnapped Ma seven years ago and has been using her as his sex slave this entire time. Jack, unaware that Old Nick is his dad (kidnapped for seven years with a five-year-old son, you do the math), has no concept of the outside world, having lived his entire life in his mother’s prison. Eventually Ma, thinking Jack is old enough to face the truth about their situation, starts devising an escape plan.

Note: minor spoilers follow

Room thankfully doesn’t stay in its one location the entire time, instead dealing with the struggles of Ma and Jack once they escape captivity. Larson, Tremblay and Joan Allen (playing Larson’s mother) all do terrific work; Larson excels at going from tough and resilient to psychologically shattered, Tremblay is absolutely convincing as a child facing the world for the first time, and Allen is remarkable as she tries to deal with both her daughter’s return and becoming a grandmother. But every time Room’s cast comes together to create a great moment Abrahamson, who directed the insufferably quirky Frank last year, finds another moment to screw things up. Twee sequences where Jack narrates things from his perspective make the film suddenly turn into “The Littlest Hostage,” and the final sequence is laughably bad, with a scene that feels like watching a PTSD version of Goodnight Moon. It’s an uneven picture that could have been much better, and that makes Room all the more frustrating.

A vastly opposing turn from last year’s mostly light and decidedly oddball Frank, Lenny Abrahamson’s next film—which will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival as a Special Program—looks to be a heartstring tightener. Room stars Brie Larson and newcomer Jacob Tremblay as a mother and son trapped within the confines of a 10ft x 10 ft one-room shed. Based on the book by Emma Donoghue, Larson plays Ma, a young woman determined not to let the smallness of the universe she and her son Jack (Tremblay) occupy limit his growth and world experience.

As evidenced by the teaser, Ma and Jack make a daring escape and young Jack faces the shocking reality that there is a world beyond the four walls he’s only ever known. Also starring William H. Macy and Joan Allen the film looks like it should elicit some serious emotion.

The film releases limitedly on October 16th and nationwide November 6th.