Room (2015) is a movie directed by Lenny Abrahamson, written by Emma Donoghue (based on her award-winning novel), and starring Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay. It’s about a woman kept prisoner by a rapist in a backyard shed for seven years where she gives birth to a son and raises him for five years before escaping. It’s also about her attempt to normalize, post-escape.

Inside the shed called Room she is known as Ma by her son Jack, and she is the whole world to him. Ma nourishes a fantastical worldview for the both of them and creates as healthy an environment as possible from the limited items available: lamp, tub, sink, toaster oven, stovetop, bed, and craft materials from garbage.

Outside Room, Ma is known as Joy Newsome, a girl who vanished at age seventeen.

Joy more than lives up to the promise of her name. Her son is a joyful boy, sated by his mother’s love; he is curious, whimsical, inspired. When he eventually escapes from the shed, he is reborn. The rolled-up rug is a second birth canal. He opens his unfocused eyes on a blindingly bright world. Room was his second womb. He can never go back. And Ma/Joy must go forward with him because he is more than her son, he is the personification of her deepest soul material, the stuff from which she has, against all odds, crafted a life.

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