Headscratchers / Room

Jack's time in the sun

Jack's first ventures outdoors are very uncomfortable; he can't take the wind or the sunlight, even with dark glasses. Why didn't they take him out after dark at first? He had fewer sensory problems on the Great Escape, because it took place at evening.

• I'm pretty sure just taking him out at night wouldn't help much in the way of transitioning him into outside lighting. Joy seems to want Jack to adjust to the world as quickly as possible, and she also might not feel as comfortable walking around outside in public at night after being kidnapped.
• Also, Jack's always going to have problems adjusting to things like daylight no matter how many times he's taken outdoors at night first. I guess Joy figured on this one it'd be better to rip the band-aid straight off rather than slowly peeling it away.
• In the film, at least, part of Joy's problem after escaping from Old Nick is that she expected to settle back into her old life quickly and is soon frustrated by her inability to do so. Her trying to expedite Jack's assimilation into the outside world could tie into that. (This is definitely in the book too.)

Keypad

• Why didn't Ma spend her spare time trying combinations on the keypad? There are 10,000 possible four-digit combinations on a ten-digit keyboards, a daunting but possible number considering that she had seven years to systematically try them all. (People have suggested that perhaps it was the kind of keypad that locked up after a certain number of wrong combinations, which would have given Ma's escape attempt away...but on a day when Ma is Gone, Jack amuses himself by playing with Keypad and nothing goes wrong).
  • It is also possible that Old Nick regularly changed the code.
  • Also, the combination is certainly possible to find by trial-and-error...if you're patient enough. Which Ma certainly wasn't. After so much time spent in that room, the only things she would've felt would be panic or hopelessness. (Also, perhaps I'm wrong, but I think they might've discussed this in the book.)
    • Ma does tell Jack that when she first came to Room, she tried the keypad all the time, but she doesn't say why she eventually stopped trying. Perhaps she didn't run out of patience so much as she ran out of hope.
  • At one point they "play Keypad" where Ma calls out numbers and Jack presses them, probably hoping to hit the combination.
    • While there might have been a little hope of striking it lucky, the Keypad game was by that point just to help Jack learn his numbers. Keypad had long ago become just another part of the unchanging scenery.
  • For what it's worth, I think I remember the film doing something to remedy this by giving the shed two doors - one that had to be unlocked with the keypad, and another that was padlocked from the outside. So even if she had figured out the code, she still would've been stuck behind another door.
  • It feels like a little empathy could be useful here. 10,000 combinations sounds like "a daunting but possible number" when you're sitting in the comfort and freedom of your own home engaging in a thought exercise on the internet. But when you're actually imprisoned in a small room for seven years by your own rapist, it probably sounds a lot more daunting and a lot less possible after even a few unsuccessful attempts.
  • Adding to the above, there's no way for Joy to be sure how many numbers are in the combination. Supposedly, she can hear the beeps as Old Nick punches it into the keypad, but he could easily be punching in extra numbers just to throw her off.
  • In order for Ma to do that, she would have had to keep track of every possible combination and what she had and hadn’t tried. Which you could do, if you’re mentally stable. Ma was kept in complete isolation except when she was raped, wasn’t bathing, hallucinating, slept for seventy percent of the day, and, to top it all of, was pregnant for majority of the first two years, and was raising a kid for the rest of them. She was not in a state of mind to successfully pull something like that off.
  • It's also possible that the keypad is set up to block multiple unsuccessful attempts from inside, or sounds an alarm.

Burn the place down!

• While it may seem a bit unorthodox, couldn't Ma have tried burning Room down from the inside? If she had enough water handy, she could've kept the fire controlled to the point where Old Nick wouldn't notice the damage until it was large enough for her to escape...Why didn't she try that?
  • In the book, the implicit answer is "It's not worth the risk" Jack actually suggests this when they are brainstorming escape plans and Ma dismisses it straight away.
  • What about before Jack was born, when Ma was alone in the shed, and thus would've had nothing to lose?
    • Having a controlled fire in that small of a space would likely have suffocated her before it would do any real damage to the shed to get her out of it. Not to mention that they never really know when Old Nick will turn up - if he were to come at a different time than Ma was expecting, he would have seen the fire, would know what Ma was planning, and things would be much worse for her because of it.

Burying Jack

• What would have happened had Old Nick just tried to bury Jack in his yard? Ma does specifically ask him to be taken away from Room, but it was a huge risk that Old Nick wouldn't have taken the simplest way of disposing of the "body"
  • Most likely, Jack would've screamed or wriggled out once he realized Old Nick wasn't putting him in the truck. Which, yes, would've gotten Ma in a lot of trouble, but she did plead for him to be taken somewhere nicer...Maybe they were trying to play at how even kidnappers and serial rapists have standards...? (Burying the body of a kidnapped woman's child in your backyard doesn't seem like a very bright idea, anyway - someone could see you doing it, and if it ever does get dug up, there'll be a pretty fresh lead to follow right from the get-go.)
    • It's easy to miss with everything else going on, but Old Nick has already buried one of Ma's babies in the backyard—and at the end of the book we see that the police have dug up and photographed the grave as part of an effort to prosecute him for murder (there's some issue about proving the baby died because of Old Nick's negligence rather than just having been born dead). It's also hinted that after the first child died, Ma had a mental breakdown and became unmanageable. With Jack, she tells Nick that if he buries him in the backyard, she'll be able to hear him crying. What she's basically telling him is "if you do this, not only will you have two dead babies in your yard, you'll have a permanently crazy and unpredictable prisoner." She is also basically saying that she doesn't care anymore, and outright says that she will scream her head off anytime the door is open if he buries jack there. He still could have ignored her, but he chose not to take the risk.
    • At least from the film, Old Nick does have some semblance of thinking himself a misguided caretaker than an out-and-out evil guy.
    • Plus, burying a baby seems a lot different than burying a 5-year-old...At the very least, you'd need a bigger hole. It was probably a lot smarter to take Jack somewhere else - it's not like there are any records of him, so even if someone does find him, they'd have no leads.
  • The escape-plot was kicked off because Old Nick lost his job and Ma feared his house will foreclose and he will get rid of them before that happens. Burying a body in the garden if you are close to lose said garden wouldn't be smart, and Ma was pretty safe in her request to have Jack buried somewhere farther away.
  • If anything, Old Nick burying Jack in his yard might have given him an even greater chance of escaping, if only because he wouldn't have been disoriented from his first car ride and having to jump from a moving vehicle. If Old Nick had just left the rolled-up rug on the ground while he dug the hole, Jack just would've needed to unroll himself and then bolt — whether he was noticed or not at that point, a single scream probably would be enough to get someone's attention, depending on the neighborhood.
  • And while he does have a nasty temper, the book and the film both imply that Old Nick isn't cold-blooded enough to outright murder anyone; his biggest threat is to kill Joy and Jack by inaction, and he up and leaves Jack to go on the run when taking him along and then killing him probably would've been more pragmatic. It's pretty evident that he's playing things by ear almost as much as his captives are, and Joy could trust that that makes him "safe" enough to risk attempting such a bald-faced move.

Choice of captivity

• Why did Old Nick choose to leave Joy in his garden shed, rather than imprisoning her somewhere inside his house? Things like soundproofing the place and putting in the door and keypad would've been more inconspicuous since he wasn't doing them outside, and if she ever did manage to escape from Room without him knowing, he wouldn't find out she was gone until he went out later on at night...assuming the police wouldn't have arrested him before then.
  • I think that part of the story might have been inspired by Jaycee Dugard, who at points was kept in a soundproof shed her kidnapper used as a recording studio.
  • It was actually inspired by the Fritzl Case, where a woman was kept in the basement with four children by her captor, who in this case was her father.
  • Keeping Joy in the garden shed means that Old Nick doesn't have to worry about any visitors to his home stumbling upon her by accident or wondering why a portion of his house is under such tight security. As for Joy escaping, as discussed in the keypad section, there wasn't a way for her to have done so without him knowing, since the most inconspicuous way out was through a padlocked door that has to be unlocked from the outside.

Parental concerns

• What happened to Joy's father? Why was he so uncomfortable about having Jack around?
  • Because he couldn't look at him without being reminded of Old Nick and what he'd done to Joy. The book went into a little more detail as to his perspective on what had happened - including how he held a funeral for Joy while she was gone - but it's basically the grandfatherly equivalent of That Thing Is Not My Child!
  • Also a lot of guilt mixed in as well, likely; Jack is, essentially, a living reminder of his failure to protect his daughter and what happened to her.

Hair growth

Shouldn't Joy's hair have grown a lot longer than it's shown to be in the film? I have to assume she didn't cut Jack's hair growing up because she didn't have the means to - Old Nick wouldn't want to give her anything that she could use as a weapon, like scissors or a knife - but Jack's hair seems longer than hers, even though he's been in Room two years less than she has.

• Her hair probably doesn't grow much longer because of malnourishment. Jacks hair is long because she makes sure he gets enough food as much as it's possible but she could do that at her own expence. Besides even for a healthy person growing waist length hair is often not as easy as simply stopping cutting them.
• She's also been pregnant and breastfeeding for almost the entire time. The body WILL prioritize the fetus over anything - you can lose bone mass and teeth during pregnancy if you're not nourished well enough.
• The book also mentions once that Ma had short hair when she was kidnapped.

Taking out the trash

• In the book, Ma tells Jack about how she tried leaving notes in the trash bags that Old Nick takes out in the hopes that someone would find them...The thought struck me: why didn't she try smuggling Jack out by hiding him in a garbage bag? She already makes him sleep in the wardrobe when Old Nick comes, so he wouldn't notice his absence, and unless Old Nick goes through the trash before taking it out, it's a lot less risky than faking Jack's death and hoping he doesn't look at the body.
  • Wouldn’t Old Nick become suspicious as soon as he picked up a garbage bag with Jack inside though? If we assume Ma usually throws away wrappers, bags, and the occasional box, toilet paper rolls, and Jack’s outgrown clothes surely it would raise an eyebrow if the trash has an extra 45 pounds out of nowhere? And that’s hoping Old Nick leaves the trash out the same day he picks it up from Room and hoping he doesn’t see Jack climb out as soon as he’s put outside.
    • She could've just taken the heaviest thing in Room, hidden it away somewhere, put Jack in the bag, and told Old Nick that the heavy thing broke and had to be thrown out to explain the extra weight. Like the TV, for example. She could tell him that Jack threw a tantrum, knocked it over, and smashed the screen in or something. And the trash has to be left outside somewhere, even if it isn't taken out to the curb right away.
    • Using the TV still would have created problems, especially depending on the model (in the movie it looks like something that came from the '90s). This assumes Ma could even lift it with her bad wrist. Which is likely why she never tried hitting Old Nick again after the toilet lid failed. And it could have risked setting off Old Nick’s temper, especially since he’s unemployed and he’ll likely assume Ma would want another TV despite her protests.
  • Also, Joy might have been reluctant to seal her son up in a plastic bag and risk smothering him.
    • So she could poke a few holes in it to help him breathe.
    • This is assuming that a) Old Nick wouldn’t look into the hole, b) find it suspicious, and c) doesn’t use clear plastic bags.
  • Old Nick would probably be expecting something so obvious — there's no reason to think he doesn't sift through the trash after taking it outside, just to make sure Joy didn't leave anything that might incriminate him. Faking Jack's death as an escape ploy was just plausible enough at the time because it could be tied back to Old Nick shutting the power off, and was a grievous enough situation to count on him not checking the body in detail. (Helped by the fact that Joy had already lost a child before.)

Joy's kidnapping

• How did Ma fall for what Old Nick did? She was a teenage girl walking alone at night when she got approached by a much older man who was telling her that his dog was sick and she needed to come to his car to help. The book made it very clear that Ma, prior to her kidnapping, was very intelligent and not completely innocent. She was in her late teens, and, in the novel, a legal adult. She wouldn’t have fallen for the most common used example of people trying to lure others into their car.
  • In Real Life, kidnapping victim Michelle Knight (now Lily Rose Lee) was lured into a house with a promise of a puppy.
  • It was probably just an instance of her letting her guard down at the wrong time. You read about things like this happening, but a lot of people just end up thinking it could never happen to them, especially if they don't live in a particularly dangerous area. She could've been lured into a false sense of security by the fact that Old Nick did not make an attempt to grab her right away, even though she was supposedly alone. (Also, it's been a while since I've read the book, but I don't recall it or the movie saying that she was nabbed during the night.)
  • The book said early in the morning. The movie implies it was the afternoon.
  • People, and especially teenagers, are not quite as worldly-wise as they (and perhaps this headscratcher) might like to think they are; what seems like a painfully obvious trick can, under the right circumstances, work surprisingly well (in part because no one would suspect that someone would use such a hoary old trick). However, that aside, we do have to remember that everything we know and learn about this situation comes from Jack or information that he manages to learn and piece together. Jack is still a five-year-old child, and he's to some extent going to be an Unreliable Narrator since (a) everything he knows and tells us about what happened to Joy is second-hand from her, (b) Joy is never going to tell him exactly what happened and (c) he's still going to have a limited ability to really comprehend or understand it. "My dog is sick" is probably not the kind of thing that would work on a somewhat mature teenaged/young woman, but it probably is the kind of thing that would work on a five-year-old, so that's presumably how Joy framed it to/around him so that he could roughly understand what happened. For all we really know, it could have been anything.
  • By the way, when did the book establish that she was "not completely innocent" before her kidnapping, especially in a way that would lead her to preempt such a kidnapping attempt? Things like this can happen to people regardless of how innocent they are.
    • I think OP meant that Joy, in the book, wasn't a virgin (she says she had an abortion about a year or so before she was kidnapped).

Jack Seeing the Keypad

• IIRC, in the film, at least, whenever Old Nick wants to leave, he has Joy face the wall away from the door, then inputs the code. But why can't she tell Jack to look at the keypad from inside the closet (drill a small hole, crack the door open the tinniest amount, have him go under the bed while Nick is asleep, etc) while Nick used it?
  • Old Nick is probably capable of blocking the keypad from view on his own. Him telling Joy to face the wall is just a needless precaution.

Destroying the evidence/Where did Old Nick go?

• Ma takes a gamble on Jack's escape knowing (even though it's not stated out loud) that there's a good chance someone won't come back for her in time – that the best she can hope for is that Jack gets free and lives a full life out there in the world, because if/when Old Nick discovers that he's gone, he's likely to head right back home and take care of Ma – not only out of vengeance, but because with Jack out there in the world, it's only a matter of time before someone finds out. So... where does he go? In the book and especially in the movie, it's implied that some time has passed between Jack falling out of the truck and the house, and Ma, being located, and Old Nick is only arrested some time after the discovery, meaning he is not on sight when Ma is found. He is very clearly angry at Ma for tricking him when he sees that Jack is alive, so why would the first thing he does after leaving be anything other than to go back to the shed and kill Ma? Other than, maybe, to attempt suicide (which, at the very least, does not seem to be successful) or barricade himself inside his home?
  • Putting it in cruel terms, it's not necessary for him to go back to her. He presumes that Jack has no way of leading the police back to Ma, and the plates on his truck can be fake/easily switched out. Why not just let her starve to death? Joy not knowing whether her son successfully escaped would also wreak havoc on her already traumatized mind. On top of that, he had a better chance of evading the police if he got out of dodge right away, especially since he was still relatively close to his home. Why take the chance of leading the police right back to the scene of his heinous crimes?

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