She allows Jack to believe that only Room and its contents ar… He wanted it, she said, "to actually cool the temperature" — to slow the film's harrowing momentum lest it turn melodramatic. And then there was the letter itself. Especially when I stepped onto the set, I was thinking, This is hideous. Give me lots of material and then I'll do the cutting. "He spoke in a very heartfelt way as a father," Donoghue said. In his place, we get Leo, Nancy’s new husband, an all-American mensch who seems genetically incapable of saying the wrong thing. The suffering in Room is about as grim as it gets. A third-party browser plugin, such as Ghostery or NoScript, is preventing JavaScript from running. In an interview with the Guardian, she said that her story was more “triggered by” than “based on” the Fritzl case, and anyway, the right to make things up is one of the few luxuries writers enjoy. Or perhaps it’s better to say that I would’ve envied it if I’d believed it, but Abrahamson and Donoghue make Jack’s recovery seem far too easy. Halfway through the film (spoiler alert!) She kind of flinches. "I just thought I would answer the question once and for all so people wouldn't waste time speculating." The filmmakers thoughtfully explore the reverberations of trauma and the workings of the coping mechanism. Donoghue puts her protagonists through a terrible ordeal to explore how trauma looks through the naïve eyes of childhood. His only actual contact with nature is the piece of sky and the occasional moon that he can see through a small skylight in the roof of the shed. In a story that derives its appeal by depicting familial love, an incest narrative is an inconvenience. Though Room's story was inherently dramatic, if not cinematic, its structure posed some challenges. ", Donoghue was thrilled to collaborate with Abrahamson, but she was never under any illusion that she had as much power over Room as he did. This is the only world the child has known and his “Ma” spends her days with him—the only person besides Old Nick with whom she has any contact—playing with him, teaching him and otherwise making a life for each other. ", "I tried to give that to Ma," Donoghue continued. But, she said, "any one true crime case kind of sticks to works based on it," and she watched with dismay as "the novel was often reviewed as the 'Fritzl novel. And there, Donoghue's own life — as a mother in a same-sex relationship — did influence its story. Responses to the film, particularly in Canada, have been breathlessly positive, perhaps unsurprisingly, since Room is a partially Canadian production, filmed in Canada, and adapted from a novel and screenplay by Irish Canadian author Emma Donoghue. She decided to adapt it herself on spec, thinking that, yes, there would be interest in making Room into a film. I see it as a major crisis in her confidence as a mother, as well as the cumulative damage of all the years in there. The room itself could have been different, or more emphasis could have been put on Old Nick, the name Jack and Ma have made up for their nameless captor. He picked up references to Plato's Cave, and that kind of thing.