When Old Nick pays his night-time visits to Ma, five-year-old Jack ducks into a wardrobe. There, a slatted partition cuts off much of his view of what’s to come. More significantly, it keeps him away from the man who abducted his mother when she was 17 and has held her captive ever since in an 11-by-11 space Jack has named Room.
After Ma and the 5-year-old protagonist of the quietly astonishing film “Room” — directed by Lenny Abrahamson and — make their escape, Ma, now 24, is reunited with her parents. Her father stews and recoils around Jack who is, for him, the embodiment of his daughter’s ordeal.
If sharing the two scenes that speak most directly to Ma’s nightmare feel like spoilers, they aren’t. As gripping and rending as “Room” is, the film is all the more subtle and affecting for not trading on true-crime conventions.
Donoghue took as the seedling for her 2010 novel the story of Elisabeth Fritzl, who was imprisoned by her father in a basement bunker in Austria for 24 years. She gave birth to seven children. She raised three in that makeshift dungeon. In many respects it is the notion of that mothering that compelled Donoghue, the mother of two.
“As a cultural consumer, I have lapped up stories of the interesting psychopath,” Donoghue admitted on the phone recently. “But as a culture, we’ve fully explored the world of the psychopath. Often the victims by contrast seem faceless and we forget them.”
Like the novel, “Room” is told from Jack’s perspective. And Jacob Tremblay’s performance is a beautiful amalgam of innocence, wonder and need. Brie Larson is fierce and canny as Ma, the woman who steadfastly builds a life for her son.
“To tell the story as one of captivity and violence is to tell the story in the captor’s terms. We are using the situation to tell something else. We are talking about what it is to parent. We’re looking at a very contained version of that,” Donoghue said about her and director Abrahamson’s choices. “I don’t think we are failing to give the story of the mother the dignity it deserves, or in any way trivializing it.”
Indeed, “Room” never feels like an evasion. Evil hangs on the periphery ready to intrude. If Ma’s moniker for her captor rings a bell, it’s because Old Nick is a nickname for the devil.
“Of course, (the abduction) is important, it’s what locks the door,” Donoghue said. “But, I couldn’t care less about the rapist. The movie refuses to tell his story. It doesn’t start with the capture. It’s a tale very much of survival. We never see Ma as an innocent girl. When we meet her, she’s already hardened and seasoned and tough. I think it gives the film a very original take on the issue of sexual violence. It resists the kidnapper’s terms as it were.” It also resists the way we’ve been trained by popular culture offerings to crave those stories.
An ethics of watching is bound to an ethics of depiction. And “Room,” playing at the Mayan Theatre, is among a number of works tussling with how to explore — not exploit — issues of sexual violence.
Although nudged by the headlines, “Room” is a marvel of non-exploitation at a time when film and television can be more and more graphically violent; at a moment when the victims in NBC’s long-running, once illuminating crime show “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” feel like an afterthought in that prime-time drama’s narrative routine.
For his post-apocalypse, action flick, director-writer George Miller brought in playwright, performer and human rights activist Eve Ensler to consult with his actresses on war-time rape and enslavement. In her April interview with Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus (two of three women who escaped from a Cleveland house they’d been imprisoned in) ABC news personality Robin Roberts remained more focused on what kept them going than on the pathology of their kidnapper/rapist.
When about the Boston Globe’s investigation into the Catholic Archdiocese’s decades-long cover-up of pedophile priests, opens, it, too, will address sex crimes from a different angle: delving into the power dynamics that protect predators, brutalize their victims and betray the rest of us.
It was telling that, when the theatergoers were cautioned about “mature themes,” because one of things they witnessed was a smartly staged version of the attack that presages the off-stage rape of Aldonza/Dulcinea by a gang of muleteers.
There was a glinting and appropriate edge to the scene, an understated but clear rebuff of the sugar-coating of violence a musical can so easily get away with.
“In film, you have the ability to distance yourself and remove yourself from the situation. Essentially you are a bystander. Theater doesn’t allow for those options,” Rod Lansberry, the artistic producer for the Arvada Center, wrote in an email. “It’s definitely a fine balance between creating a believable scene and exploiting a scene.”
One of the most thought-provoking offerings at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was the New Frontier installation . The video-installation enabled goggle-wearing viewers to enter a room, take a seat on a worn couch and experience (not too explicitly) a college date rape from the female and male student’s point of view.
“Rose wasn’t going for a shocking expose, she was going for the gray areas, the deeper social code that allow these things to happen,” Shari Frilot, said.
“This issue simply lacks language to negotiate the terms of a date rape. Maybe even more than ‘The Hunting Ground’ (Kirby Dick’s documentary about campus rape also screened at the festival), this really shined a light on just how at a loss our society is.” (The is set to take the piece to five college campuses.)
“The piece was trying to look at the shockingly casual nature of the way in which these things happen,” Troche said on the phone from New York, where she’s at work on another virtual-reality tale, this one featuring a violent cop-teen confrontation.
“There are these assumptions that if you talk to me at a party then it’s already a done deal. And if you happen to pass out, well, we were going to do this any way, weren’t we?”
As morally bankrupt as that reasoning is, Troche doesn’t believe all campus rapes are the work of sexual predators. “That boy (in ‘Perspective’) didn’t want to be a rapist. That girl didn’t want to have been a victim,” she said. “But these things happen instantly. They happen with nuance.”
“Perspective” and “Room” represent two different and powerful efforts by storytellers to engage an issue that is a fact in many people’s lives in tones richer than black and white. The better they achieve those ambitions, the smarter we watchers become.
