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Room is an independent Irish-Canadian drama film based on a novel by Emma Donoghue and directed by Lenny Abrahamson, first screened at the Telluride Film Festival in 2015. A real event set the stage for the movie. In 2008 the media disclosed that an Austrian man Joseph Fritzl kept his daughter prisoner for 24 years in the basement of their home and had fathered 7 children by her. Inspired by this horrifying story, Donoghue wrote Room and then the screenplay about Joy Newsome (Brie Larson), a girl deceived by a psychotic man into falling into his trap for seven years of imprisonment in a small room with one window facing the sky. She is raped repeatedly by her captor Old Nick (Sean Bridgers) and gives birth to a child who becomes her only solace.
When Jack (the child) reaches age five, Joy devises a successful escape. She teaches Jack to play dead, wraps him in a bedraggled rug and ask Old Nick to take him to a hospital in the hope that Jack might be saved. Nick believes the ploy, dumps the rug with Jack's apparent corpse in the back of his truck and drives away. Jack dazedly seizes his opportunity, jumps out the truck and asks a passersby to help. And so mother and child are saved. In this paper I look at the relationship between the child (Jack) and the mother (Joy) and the biological rapist father (Old Nick) from the perspective of Freud's Oedipus complex (Freud, 1924d) and compare it with Lacan's view (Lacan and Fink, 2006, Lacan, 2017). Then, I analyze the movie in terms of what I call transitional time object (TTO).
At the outset there is no hint of discontent in the mother-child dyad. But one quickly learns that the mother desperately wants to escape. The movie begins on a day like any other day for any mother and child. They exercise. Jack greets every object in the room and helps prepare breakfast. Abrahamson keeps the audience in the same profound ignorance that Jack is in. In spite of this, we sense something is wrong, unlike Jack whose only communication wi