The Room (2006) Reviews

• What the hell??

  dschmeding2009-09-19

  I just sat through this movie with 3 friends with very different tastes in movies... everyone was appalled by it. The director obviously thinks he was doing some artsy movie... you can tell by the endless playing with different tints on the visuals which turn from reddish to blueish to some of the ugliest and most disgusting overblown whites I have ever seen. The problem is that there was some things going for "The room"... first of all the music was excellent and built some atmosphere which was huge part of what kept my interest in the ridiculous plot. Second there are some interesting shots which look really good and the strange inter-cutting of flash-backs make you hope for a giant twist or surprise. You won't get any... biggest problem here is that the movie is placed in the horror drawer and has a criminally misleading cover (such planned misleading of the viewer angers me every time). The whole "room-thing" is a joke... there is nothing happening except endless shots of people slowly moving towards a strange door or a strange light. The movie is rather short yet still seems endless because dozens of sequences are stretched to a maximum hardly bearable and often turning into a kind of joke. Some of the acting is horrendous like the bad bad baaad father who is ridiculously overacted and suffers from some incredibly lame dialog like the other family members. The sequences when the daughter finds out her pregnancy seem like they wanted an Oscar but reached out for a razzie. Parts of the movie seem like comedic elements... I am still wondering if i heard right that the sons answering machine said "I am dead at the moment, please speak after the ring!" and there's a bunch of other misplaced scenes which made not just me laugh. The basic premise of a broken family placed in a house, finding some strange new door, all phones not working and unable to get out is already lame but the atmosphere works because of the music. Its kind of like you watch the movie but realize too late that it sucks bad, then hope for a surprise to give meaning to all of this and fall flat after 80 minutes of boredom. Neither the mysterious door, nor the strange Shining-References (like the bunny-rabbit shining story from the web) make much sense to me and honestly (SPOILER AHEAD!!!) ... movies that go for the "Its all just a dream" mode to get out of a bad scripts mess should be banned for acute lameness. A bad bad movie from an director who messed up bad although he had some talented people in his crew.

• Absolutely awful abstract oddity from Belgium, Enough said.

  poolandrews2010-12-23

  The Room starts one day, just like any other for the family living in the large house in the country. The pregnant thirty year old Melinda (Caroline Veyt) does nothing but stay at home & care for her paralysed brother Alex (Pascal Duquenne) while their parents Max (Philippe Résimont) & Marie (Françoise Mignon) seem to hate each other & pretty much everyone else too as their younger brother John (Henri Luyckx) just finds the whole situation funny. The, suddenly, a mysterious door with carved letter on it appears at the end of an upstairs hallway. At first locked the family begin to argue & face their problems but what dark fate awaits them behind the door & inside the room... This Belgium production was written, produced & directed by Giles Daoust & is quite simply one of the most bizarre, pointless & unintentionally hilarious films I've seen in ages. Talk about a dysfunctional family, this lot in The Room are so exaggerated they come across as cartoon character's. Seriously, there is no subtlety here whatsoever. It's just flat out embarrassing dramatics that are so silly, overwrought & unbelievable that I was quite literally laughing. Froim the revelations that Max is a failed musician to Melinda & Alex having sex to John's ratty little friend Ben laughing at his host's as they argue to debate over Melinda's baby (like it's anyones choice other than hers) to Marie completely losing one scene & laying into everyone before the next scene where she writes a heartfelt letter of apology to neither Marie or Max wanting to look after their retard son Alex. The acting, dubbing, dialogue, character's & timing is dire & makes the whole film unintentionally funny when it's not being painfully boring. If that wasn't bad enough we only ever see Melinda enter the room & that so-called twist ending just adds insult to injury as the makers use the clichéd 'it was all a dream' nonsense. God damned The Room is awful. I'm not sure if the script was meant as a serious piece of drama that intended have some deep & dark character studies but as I said everything is so amateurish & overwrought it has no impact at all & the mild supernatural overtones just add more confusion & dissatisfaction. A real stinker. Obviously shot in Belgium the version I saw was dubbed into English & not since the heyday of the Italian splatter film have I seen such bad dubbing, while one could argue the dubbing on a film can add to it I assume The Room is meant to be a serious drama dealing with serious life changing issues but the bad dubbing, wooden English dialogue & strange accents meant I couldn't help but find the whole thing ever so slightly funny. Once inside the room itself there is more comedy gold, it's basically a big black space with a blue light in the distance. Melinda walks towards the light & sees various images of young black African children, you know the sort of images that the media uses to make us buy charity records. Bizarrely there's one shot of a kid with his eyes bulging out which again is just more funny than anything else as he looks like he's pulling a strange face to make his mates laugh. The whole film is just misjudged & probably achieves the exact opposite of what the makers intended. I won't even go into the scene when Melinda goes back downstairs to find red flowers growing out of the furniture & carpet in her living room! With a supposed budget of about €500,000 this looks cheap, the lighting, the setting, the special effects & the production values in general. Apparently shot in Brussels in Belgium. The acting might originally have been alright but slap the silly voices & dire English dubbing over them & it's painfully funny to watch, the things they say & the way it's said is just pure comedy. The Room is awful, is succeeds as nothing, not a drama, not a thriller or a horror film & I wouldn't even say it has any horror aspects to it apart from the dialogue, of course. The end credits are quite nice as there's an impressive large scale pan back from the house over miles of fields but overall I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

• Weird and Theatrical Low-Budget Movie

  claudio_carvalho2009-05-23

  The crippled Alex (Pascal Duquenne) has Down syndrome and is stuck to a wheelchair since he was pushed by his sister Melinda (Caroline Veyt) and felt in the staircase of his house years ago. His dysfunctional family does not respect him and is composed by his violent father Max (Philippe Résimont), who is a frustrated composer unable to sell his compositions; his hysterical and submissive mother Marie (Françoise Mignon); and his younger brother John (Henri Luyckx) that abuses of him with his friend Benjamin (Maximilien Jouret-Maron). Only Melinda that is pregnant of an unknown man takes care of him, but she will leave Alex and her family sooner to raise her unborn baby alone. While having dinner together, a mysterious doors appears upstairs and Benjamin first followed by John vanishes after entering in the unexplainable room. Max and Marie find that they are trapped in the house and while having a conversation in the living room, deep secrets are disclosed. "The Room" is a weird and theatrical low-budget movie, supported by an original non-linear screenplay that is confused in some moments with the flashbacks entwined with present situations and showing a surprising conclusion; good performances of Caroline Veyt, Françoise Mignon and Pascal Duquesne (I found Philippe Résimont histrionic and I did not like his performance); and wonderful and stylish cinematography and camera work. In the beginning, the camera introduces the location and the characters in only one continuous take. I believe most of the viewers have not understood that the door, the room and the vanishings are not physical but only the reality created by Alex in his mind, imagining to stay with his beloved sister and get rid off his despicable family. My vote is six. Title (Brazil): "O Quarto" ("The Room")

• Tripe. Absolute Tripe.

  mack-592007-01-04

  Giles Daoust's film is boring, stale and troubling. Troubling because somehow he got to write, produce and direct this film with no outside guidance. That is a bad thing. This film feels like a cheap knock-off of classic thrillers rather than the intended homage that Daoust had anticipated when creating this awful thriller. Stay away. Stay clear away. Social issues of abandonment and abuse are seen miles away and the climax of the film is boring, needless and predicted from the first frame. Despite any allusion to horror and/or violence by the DVD cover the film is sorely lacking in any. It is a clearly misleading image used to sell a horrible film to an unknowing audience. Buyers and Renters beware.

• Abysmal film-making at its worst

  capcanuk2008-06-13

  This film is just dreadful. Ther are no words to describe just HOW dreadful it is. oh wait! Yes there are! Whever you read people's comments on IMDb about some film being "the worst film ever made", well, they have obviously never had an hour and a half from their life stolen by sitting through this piece of drek. From uselessly "atmospheric" scenes that are prolonged far past their usefulness to any sort of story-telling, to characters that are themselves far beyond "cartoons" (amusingly alluded to in the brief television excerpts from those insane bunny rabbits doing "The Shining in 30 seconds"). There are painfully stretched out scenes of slowly walking down a poorly lit corridor (and I mean BAD lighting, not simply "dark", but truly, painfully BAD use of lighting technique), where the only thing that you can think is "at this rate the film will last a week before everyone in the film gets killed off!" The acting is bland and amateurish, with the single exception of Philippe Résimont, who chews scenery with an enthusiasm that I have only seen rivaled in the very worst of community theatre. Every scene in which we have the displeasure of seeing him looks like a drunken brother-in-law at a pool party doing his best imitation of Jack Nicholson in "The Shining". And we're talking about that brother-in-law we all have who couldn't act his way out of a soggy paper bag. I know, my review is a bit "over the top", but I'm just one of those people who NEVER hates a movie. So I'm rather shocked at the extent this film brought up feelings of revulsion and disgust. That someone put up perfectly good money to pay for this garbage revolts me. That I now have to go back and re-adjust all of my former votes on IMDb to bring them up a notch, to leave SOME room for how low I want to rate this film. This film is NOT full of "cool imagery" nor atmosphere, nor is it by ANY stretch of the imagination "original". It's pure garbage. Don't waste your time.