Room (Lenny Abrahamson, 2015)

Adapted from Emma Donoghue's hugely successful book, Room takes on the considerable challenge of relating a story told in novel form through the unreliable narrative filter of a five-year-old boy who thinks that the whole of reality is the room that he and his mother have been held captive in for the whole of his life. Whereas the novelist has absolute dominion over what we have to take as reality, the filmic medium will always compromise this by sheer force of the visual image, so it's very much to the credit of all involved that it still works. It also depends heavily on the casting, of course, and it's a blessing that the child actor at the core is quite remarkably self-possessed yet credible as someone who is effectively both alien and abused child at the same time. Maybe it speaks a lot for the strength of the source material too, but we've seen countless adaptations of novels fall flat on their faces with far easier tasks before them, and the end result is quite affecting.

7/10