The Room Parent Guide

Matt (Kevin Janssens), a struggling artist, has bought an abandoned home in upstate New York, hoping that it will inspire his work. After he moves in with his wife Kate (Olga Kurylenko), they find a hidden room – and this isn’t just any room. If either of them wishes for anything in that room, it appears – money, champagne, fancy clothing, any material possession they can think of. After a few days of drunken debauchery, the couple realize that they aren’t really any happier than they were before they had piles of cash in their living room. Thinking seriously, Kate decides to try and use the room to have something she’s always wanted – a child. But there are consequences to using the room, and things are more complicated than either Kate or Matt can imagine…

The Room isn’t trying to be scary so much as thought provoking. The “horror” comes from the consequences of poor decision making, but it doesn’t ever become truly frightening. The film tries a few jump scares, but since there’s little tension and nothing to be properly scared of, even those fail to pump any adrenaline. The thought experiment also struggles to outlast the runtime, but the film shifts gears around the third act to compensate and it seems to help keep the film from feeling tired.

Despite its interesting premise, The Room is grossly unsuitable for family viewing. It manages to avoid the relentless profanity, gore, and substance use I would have expected from an “R” rated horror flick, but it catches up with two truly unsettling depictions of sexual assault. There isn’t any explicitly sexual nudity in the film, but frankly, if it meant the absence of an arguably incestuous rape scene, I would have traded for it in a heartbeat. I don’t think that’s what people meant when they said they want more “family togetherness” on screen.

To paraphrase that wise philosopher, Mick Jagger, “You shouldn’t always get what you want”. Unlimited acquisition of material wealth at no apparent cost and for no purpose other than possession is clearly terrible for people, and it doesn’t do Matt or Kate any favors. This is also a great advertisement for not having children, especially in cursed houses. You’d think people would have learned after the first dozen movies about haunted kids, but nope. Every year, a new batch of morons move into large abandoned country estates and realize, as if for the first time, why they were abandoned in the first place. Pro tip: If the locals refer to your new address as “House of Blood”, maybe think twice before trying to get that mattress up the stairs.