The 12th edition of the Dubai International Film Festival gets under way on Wednesday with a gala screening of Room, which is toted as one of the favourites to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards next year.
The acclaimed drama has already won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival. In the past seven years, three films that have won that award – Slumdog Millionaire (2008), The King's Speech (2010) and 12 Years a Slave (2013) – have gone on to Oscar glory.
As with 12 Years a Slave, Room deals with a harrowing subject matter. It tells the story of a mother (Brie Larson) and her 5-year-old son (Jacob Tremblay) who are held captive in a tiny, squalid room for more than five years. One cannot help but think of the horrors enacted by Josef Fritzl in Austria and the Ariel Castro kidnappings in Cleveland, Ohio.
But what is perhaps most remarkable about the film is how Irish director Lenny Abrahamson (previously best known for his quirky comedies Adam and Paul and Frank is able to transcend the dark subject to create a story that is about the ability of people to triumph over adversity, and the joys of motherhood.
The film is based on the 2010 Man Booker Prize novel of the same name by Irish playwright Emma Donoghue. When Abrahamson was approached to adapt it for the screen, he immediately identified a challenge that needed to be solved.
“What is so fascinating about the book – and what is so hard to translate into film – is that the book is told from the point of a view of a 5-year-old boy,” he says. “For the boy, this life trapped in a room is the only world he knows – and how he describes his life, versus what we [as readers] know is the truth – that is where the power and emotion of the book comes from.”
So Abrahamson asked Donoghue to help him view the story from another angle.
“We were just really interrogating it, looking into how you capture the essence of the book but without having the voice of the child.”
The director was also determined that he didn’t want the experience of watching the film to be morbidly voyeuristic, like looking at the aftermath of a car crash.
“There is no point in just telling the story as a ‘look how awful the crime is’ kind of tale,” he says. “I’m also allergic to sentiment, and this is a sentimental story – but the story has a strong cathartic element to it, which makes it bearable.”
It’s this cathartic element of the script that gives the film its greatest power. We have all seen countless films about damsels in distress, or someone trapped and desperate to escape – much more rare is a drama that looks at the consequences of a crime, and the impact it has not just only on the victims, but also on their family and friends.
A significant aspect of the film is about how mother and son reintegrate themselves into the world.
Another element that ramps up the emotions in Room is the brilliant performance from Larson. The 26-year-old, born Brianne Sidonie Desaulniers, previously appeared in the 2012 reboot of high-school cop comedy 21 Jump Street, played the more stable sister of Amy Schumer in Trainwreck, and starred as the supervisor of a home for troubled teenagers in the drama Short Term 12.
To prepare for Room, she locked herself up alone in her apartment. The silence at isolation from the outside world triggered childhood memories, including a move from Sacramento to Los Angeles with her mother and younger sister.
"I remember that time as being as being one of the greatest times of my life," says Larson. "I was so happy. My mom has this incredible imagination and she instilled so much life into that space that I never felt like I was lacking and I didn't realise that we didn't have anything." One night, she awoke to find her mother in floods of tears. "I didn't realise until years later that my father had asked for a divorce and that is why we moved to LA," says Larson. "She was dealing with it completely alone but she has created this world of imagination for me and my sister." These experiences and memories helped her build her character in Room. "That, to me, was such a huge part of my life to bring to the film," she adds.
• The invite-only opening-night gala screening of Room is tonight at 8pm at Madinat Arena. A second screening, at 10pm tomorrow at Madinat Theatre, is sold out but standby tickets be available at the venue tomorrow
