Room review (or how pointless the Oscars are and we should all just go and eat cake)

by Luke Jones

First of all, there will be no spoilers for Room in this review. I will confirm that there is a room and that Brie Larson acts her bloody socks off in it. It’s gruelling, in the way that films that make you care about its characters are gruelling when said characters go through tough times. But it’s also uplifting, unexpectedly funny, and probably made me cry (good tears and bad) more than any film has since that time Pixar rubbed mustard into my eyes during the first ten minutes of Up!

So you should go and see it. However, seeing it so soon after seeing the Revenant threw up an interesting contrast. Room is another OSCAR film, with Larson a virtual lock to for Best Actress. Her performance, by nature of the film in which she appears, is raw and devastating. It’s a performance that calls for warmth one moment and hollow-eyed depression the next, but Larson never loses sight of the character underneath. It’s a part that could have easily slipped into histrionics, but Larson (and the team around her) go for the quiet gut punch rather than the Academy Award roundhouse.

Brie Larson - likes to sing in her Room

It couldn’t be further from Leo DiCaprio’s bear-bothering antics in the Revenant, where the film’s quest for realism saw life and art merge into one indistinct whole. Yet both performances are undeniably effective in their respective films, Leo in his quest for revenge and Larson in her quest for something in the somewhere (see, no spoilers here). They may not be in the same Oscar category (thanks to gender segregation that’s as outdated as the Academy’s reluctance to admit that non-white people exist) but to try and quantify whether either performance is better is futile; both are excellent performances that use very different rulebooks.

It’s not new to say that the Oscars aren’t really about the nominated films, but Room hit home for me just how pointless the whole endeavour is. The buzz around Larson is even more ridiculous considering how ridiculously good the other people who may or may not be in the film are aswell (location, spoilertown. Population = zero). So go and see the Revenant. Go see Room. Check out Pride while you’re at it, which is one of the best films of the past couple of years yet didn’t even get to first base with Oscar. And just enjoy what all of these people can do with a few lines of dialogue and a couple of hours of your attention.

Oh, and eat cake. Not only is it awesome, but it’s a lot quieter than popcorn in the cinema.