Room Review

Abrahamson makes one crucial decision early. The camera stays at the boy's height and inside his understanding, so the shed is not a prison but a complete cosmos with a lamp, a wardrobe and a skylight. That framing spares us the exploitation the material invites, because the horror arrives sideways instead, in a mother's rationing of vitamins and her flinch at a sound on the path. The escape, a boy rolled in a rug and told to count, is unbearable in the way only a scene with a child at its center can be.

Then the film does the braver thing and keeps going for another hour, into press interviews, grandparents who cannot look at him, and a mother discovering that surviving and recovering are separate jobs. Brie Larson plays exhaustion and rage without ever asking to be admired for it, and Jacob Tremblay gives the least mannered child performance in recent memory. The photography is plain and the last stretch loses some tension, but few films this decade have been so clear that rescue is the middle of the story rather than the end of it.