Imagine what it would be like to grow up living in a single room, with your mother. You never leave the room, ever. You see TV that depicts the outside world, sometimes real, sometimes fiction. The only other person you know besides your mother, is a man who enters the room once a day to have sex with her.
This movie shows us what such a life might be like, as seen from the eyes of a 5-year-old who grew up in just that situation. His mother was kidnapped years ago, and has been held captive in a shed ever since, by her rapist kidnapper. One of his rapes produces her son, and she takes it upon herself to try to raise him as much as possible in that small, limited space, with only play, some toys, and television to entertain him. His understanding of the real world is naturally limited, and the movie does an excellent job of showing how living in such an extremely limited situation might realistically affect a child's worldview.
Eventually, the mother gets the idea to create an escape plan, which her son would have to help carry out. It would be very difficult for a 5-year-old who spent his entire life confined to a single room to understand things like "Run to people for help", "Wait for the car to stop", and so on, considering all this is things he's never done before, and the poor boy does indeed almost freeze up and get rekidnapped. But escape he does, and get picked up by the police, who end up rescuing his mom based on his limited information.
That's when the movie changes to a totally different story. Now, it's about the boy and his mother adjusting to life in the real world away from the kidnapper, which is sometimes harder on the mother than it is on the child. But even the boy has a problem with it. Given lots of toys and a chance at a new life, he's so familiar with the routine of the old one that he resorts to doing what he did before and living as before. He doesn't explore the new world in front of him, and shows no interest in his toys. But there is hope: he's only 5 years old, and his brain is more "plastic" than it would be if he'd lived his life as an adult in the same world the whole time, so he's more able to accept drastic change.
Basically, Room is almost two stories in one. The first is how the boy and his mother handle daily life as prisoners in a shed. The second is how they handle their newfound freedom after years of living in a single room. Well, there's also the inbetween action of the rescue as well.
Both stories are handled really well. The movie feels like almost a case study - albeit a fictional one - of how someone handles a lifetime of captivity and an extremely limited world. How it shapes the way one lives, the way one thinks, the way one acts when suddenly presented with a totally different, much more open world. As a fascinating "what if" scenario, I'd recommend checking it out.
(movie review) What if your entire world was just one single room?
Imagine what it would be like to grow up living in a single room, with your mother. You never leave the room, ever. You see TV that depicts the outside world, sometimes real, sometimes fiction. The only other person you know besides your mother, is a man who enters the room once a day to have sex with her.
This movie shows us what such a life might be like, as seen from the eyes of a 5-year-old who grew up in just that situation. His mother was kidnapped years ago, and has been held captive in a shed ever since, by her rapist kidnapper. One of his rapes produces her son, and she takes it upon herself to try to raise him as much as possible in that small, limited space, with only play, some toys, and television to entertain him. His understanding of the real world is naturally limited, and the movie does an excellent job of showing how living in such an extremely limited situation might realistically affect a child's worldview.
Eventually, the mother gets the idea to create an escape plan, which her son would have to help carry out. It would be very difficult for a 5-year-old who spent his entire life confined to a single room to understand things like "Run to people for help", "Wait for the car to stop", and so on, considering all this is things he's never done before, and the poor boy does indeed almost freeze up and get rekidnapped. But escape he does, and get picked up by the police, who end up rescuing his mom based on his limited information.
That's when the movie changes to a totally different story. Now, it's about the boy and his mother adjusting to life in the real world away from the kidnapper, which is sometimes harder on the mother than it is on the child. But even the boy has a problem with it. Given lots of toys and a chance at a new life, he's so familiar with the routine of the old one that he resorts to doing what he did before and living as before. He doesn't explore the new world in front of him, and shows no interest in his toys. But there is hope: he's only 5 years old, and his brain is more "plastic" than it would be if he'd lived his life as an adult in the same world the whole time, so he's more able to accept drastic change.
Basically, Room is almost two stories in one. The first is how the boy and his mother handle daily life as prisoners in a shed. The second is how they handle their newfound freedom after years of living in a single room. Well, there's also the inbetween action of the rescue as well.
Both stories are handled really well. The movie feels like almost a case study - albeit a fictional one - of how someone handles a lifetime of captivity and an extremely limited world. How it shapes the way one lives, the way one thinks, the way one acts when suddenly presented with a totally different, much more open world. As a fascinating "what if" scenario, I'd recommend checking it out.