The Room is currently streaming on Shudder.
Your experience might have been different. Many years ago, my friends Stacy and Dave bought a home located in a small town in New England. Having been built in the late 1700s, their house passed through many owners until they came into its centuries-long life. As owners often do, Dave enthusiastically went to work tearing the place apart.
He remodeled the bathroom, redid the floors, and profoundly changed the interiors of that old house. Hell, he probably installed a subway system. Dave is one of those guys who’s happiest when there’s a project before him. He relishes each step in the process, and also likely enjoys knocking gigantic holes in the walls.
What Dave and others like him surely realize is that even the most extensive renovation projects can’t fully erase the past. Certain characteristics of a building want to be seen, despite the best efforts of the owners. Sometimes those characteristics can be…unsavory, to say the least. The new horror movie, The Room,* examines what happens when something is unearthed following the purchase of a new home, something that should have stayed buried.
There’s one other snag. As he’s departing, the electrician mentions his surprise that someone has bought the old place. The previous owners were brutally slain within the house, and the house has remained dormant since then.** Matt does a little online sleuthing and finds that the killer, known only as John Doe (John Flanders), is conveniently housed in a local mental hospital. As so often happens with our best internet sessions, Matt is drunk enough to fall down a rabbit hole but not drunk enough to pass out.
Matt stumbles past the steel door, into the empty room, and collapses. He leans back, drains a bottle of booze. With a sigh, he says to himself, “I need another bottle.” The lighting flickers. Everything goes dark for a moment. When the lights come up, another full bottle has appeared. The following morning, Kate finds him in the room, surrounded by things that weren’t there before. A kind of enchantment exists where anything wished for can become a tangible reality.
Remember the old story, The Monkey’s Paw, the one where a mystical thingamajig grants wishes, but does so with a perverse twist? Director Christian Volckman is going for something similar. A limited budget and a handful of locations meant Volckman had to be creative. Instead of relying on CGI, he focuses on an atmosphere of slow, creeping dread. The Room has a couple of jump scares, but it leans closer to psychological horror in the first two acts. The third act features clever camera trickery and some trippy imagery while remaining rooted in character.
Written by Volckman, Sabrina B. Karine, and Eric Forestier, the screenplay does a number of things very well. Nobody cares why the room has magical powers, and the script knows that the important part is watching how the characters react to it. They push the capabilities of the room, discover its limitations, and we see the growing rift between Kate and Matt. Volckman, Karine, and Forestier have written a morality play that would be right at home in The Twilight Zone, and I enjoyed their take on the choices the characters make and their curdled wishes.
The Room is a clever psychological thriller that examines the horror of getting what we want. Its dark, twisty, and intense filmmaking put the screws to characters that are a great deal like any of us. Though I like to think a decent home inspection could have saved them a ton of problems.
*I know, there’s already the 2003 Tommy Wiseau trashterpiece called The Room, and the very good 2015 Brie Larsen film called Room. A wise producer would have insisted on a title change with this one.
**You would have thought their Realtor would have mentioned that.
***He also spends a ton of time withholding information from Kate. I like to think my wife and I would have a healthy chat about moving into a house where a murder was committed and our discovery of a room with reality-warping powers. I like to think that, anyway.