Review of...THE ROOM

The Room (2019)

Director: Christian Volckman

Writer: Christian Volckman, Sabrina B. Karine, Eric Forestier, Gaia Guasti, Vincent Ravalec.

Starring: Olga Kurylenko, Kevin Janssens

Brief Summary: While settling into their new home, a married couple find a secret room that grants them anything they wish for. After indulging in luxuries, they wish for something they could not have produced on their own – an infant. The couple must decide whether this baby is real or not.

Body Count: 2

​Scariest/Gross Scene: The scary scene is when the child is getting verbally abused by his father. But then again, the bigger question is whether or not this child is a real person. Sure, other scenes are much more uneasy and terrifying, but I wouldn't want to spoil the horror. 

Why this movie needs to be watched:
     It's interesting to see what an artist/painter husband and part-time translator/transcriber (if that's her thing?) wife would wish for given the opportunity to do so. They party it up real hard for like a week straight. And they do so much within so little time, it's like they got tired of being granted anything and everything real quick. But things take a dark turn. They don't have everything they ever wanted, not yet.
            After two miscarriages, Kate (Olga Kurylenko), wishes for a baby without letting Matt (played by Kevin Janssens), her husband know. He comes home to hear cries in another room and is instantly shocked and furious. This is where the main conflict of the film is presented – do Kate and Matt raise this child as if it were their own or do they dispose of it as if it weren't a real baby. It makes for some dark social commentary, but it also provides for some terrifying story telling.
          The mechanics for how this wish granting room works isn't told, that'd be for a whole other movie, but what we're presented with is the boundaries for which this wish granting room works within. First, you pretty much can wish for anything and it will appear in that room. For scale, a whole new landscape was wished for in that room, complete with a forest and snow in the middle of summer. And for the purposes of this film and it's key characters, objects wished for were limited by an artists' imagination and the mind of an innocent child. Second, any object wished for aged quickly into dust once brought outside of the home, otherwise, you could potentially have it forever.
              This films' story line could have gone a million different ways, but instead, it stuck with an ethical theme, one that may be horrifying for some and not for others. The idea in this story is not whether or not to have a child, but rather, when a child is brought into this world, planned or not, what you do moving forward matters most. The only options are the right way or the wrong way and this story becomes very, very dark.