The movie poster for Room shows a young mother, head tilted back, garbed in comfortable-looking gray, swinging her little boy in her arms. He’s wearing a plaid jacket, a raccoon hat, and a cute-as-the-dickens smile. The sky above them is a weave of clouds and azure; autumnal trees fan out behind them; a flock of birds soars. “Love knows no boundaries,” runs the tagline. The only dissonant note is a faint intersection of lines above them and to the left, suggesting a glass box around the pair. But you have to look for it to notice it.
I like to imagine how long it would take for an unwary moviegoer, presented with just that poster, to guess what Room is actually about. Maternal love and some sort of triumph of the human spirit — that much they could figure out. But it would probably take a lifetime’s worth of guesses to get from there to the movie’s horrifying hook.
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