Room (2015)

I was in no hurry to see this, not because I'd heard it was disturbing, but because the very marketing turned me off. That title? The poster of a woman hugging her child? Doesn't evoke anything I haven't seen before. Well, nothing like a long plane ride to get me to watch what I wasn't planning to.

It turns out to have a most unusual plot. If five-year-old protagonist Jack's (Jacob Tremblay) girly-length "Samson" hair doesn't clue one in that there's something off about his upbringing, his opening monologue does. We soon determine that he has spent his entire life in a single, all-purpose room with only his mother Joy (Brie Larson) for company. He doesn't even believe in a true outside world, thinking that TV is 100% fake. At first I thought "Ma" was an eccentric, broke, paranoid recluse, but her stay turns out to be involuntary -- as a kidnapped sex slave for the last seven years. The time comes that Joy decides he's ready to learn the truth about their situation, apart from his implied parentage.

What I'm about to say could be called a spoiler, but it may just make you more willing to tune in....

Thankfully, about halfway thru the movie, they escape to mainstream civilization. It's implied that the ex-captor, known only as "Old Nick," gets arrested, but we're spared all details of the trial. Of course, this is not the end of the drama; if anything, it gets more interesting from there. Jack obviously has a lot to learn and get used to, and his youthful proclivity to emotion over reason doesn't help. His grandfather (William H. Macy), understandably but unwisely, wants to pretend that Jack doesn't exist. And Joy wonders whether she had acted with his best interests in mind. (Nobody thinks to point out that asking Nick to send baby Jack to an orphanage would've been risky: Nick could easily have killed Jack and left Joy none the wiser.)

It's a thoughtful tale, but I'm not sure what moral if any to take away from it. Alas, it's tempting to identify the moral as "No good deed goes unpunished." Nick had initially tricked Joy with an appeal to altruism. The escape, oddly enough, works by eliciting a rare level of mercy from Nick. Small wonder that Joy tells her mother that she has a reason not to be as nice as she once was.

The ending is happy enough, but that alone does not make a feel-good movie. As fresh yet credible as the story is, as good as the acting is even by previously unknown actors, I can't bring myself to rate it especially highly. You have to be in a pretty rare mood to want to see it for any purpose besides cultural education.