The Room Review

Take it on its own terms first, because it asks to be taken that way. Johnny is a banker engaged to Lisa, Lisa is sleeping with his best friend Mark, and Wiseau plays the whole thing as tragedy. The failures are not subtle. Subplots open and are abandoned without comment: Lisa's mother announces she has breast cancer and it is never raised again, Denny's debt to a drug dealer resolves in a scene that leads nowhere, and a character is swapped out mid film with one line of dialogue covering it.

Scenes end on nobody's beat. The rooftop is an obvious composite over a real San Francisco alley the production could simply have shot in. Dialogue repeats greetings and weather in place of exposition, and four of the five love scenes are cut like perfume advertisements and scored with the same slow jam.

The acting is where sympathy is owed rather than mockery. Greg Sestero and Juliette Danielle are working actors delivering lines nobody could land, directed by a man who was also the lead and the money. What survives from them is a strained competence, and it is real.

What lifts this past a bad film is what happened next. Wiseau kept a billboard up for years, booked screenings himself, and audiences arrived to shout back and throw spoons. Two decades on it still plays monthly in cities across the country, in the participatory tradition of Rocky Horror, and it produced a well reviewed film about its own making. That is a real cultural object. It is also an F, and neither fact cancels the other.