[Row Three programming if we owned a Rep Cinema]

One Room Does It All

Tape – 7:30pm
Fermat’s Room – 9:15pm
Exam – 11pm

Sometimes you don’t need a lot of locations to make a movie. Often a handful or even just a single location suffices to sell the story at hand. All three of these films are set primarily within a single room, give or take a scene or two out with. The obvious choices would have been the likes of 12 Angry Men, Saw, Rear Window and Reservoir Dogs but I thought I’d highlight some perhaps lesser known (modern) films.

Richard Linklater is a fairly prolific director, having made a film every 1-3 years throughout his career, and is most known for films like Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and A Scanner Darkly. Tape is one of his lesser known films, despite starring a couple of (now) huge names. Set entirely within a motel room, it centers on Jon (Robert Sean Leonard) who visits his old friend Vince (Ethan Hawke) at his motel before the premiere of his film at a festival. To kill time the two get into often heated discussions about their friendship and their regrettable past actions. Uma Thurman joins the two of them later on to amp up the tension as Amy, a past girlfriend of Jon’s. A real gem filled with terrific performances, a great sense of realism in the conversations and a palpable urgency, helped not least by the fact that it’s shot in DV and done entirely in real-time.

Fermat’s Room (or La habitación de Fermat, to use its original Spanish name) is one of those movies where you’re presented with a mysterious situation and that mystery unravels as it progresses. In this case it centers on an unknown person inviting a group of people to a secluded house far away from the city. Once they enter and end up in a main living room-type area the door’s lock shut and they soon learn they have to continually solve math puzzles and text the answer to a cell phone number before the timer runs out. Each time one of the timers counts down to zero before the puzzle is solved the walls of the room start to close in on them. Talk about a plot hook. There’s been an English-language remake in the development stage for a while (no wonder with a plot as good as that) but this Cube-esque mystery-thriller is well worth checking out.

The last film of the night is also the most recent, the compelling single room mystery that is Exam. Eight total strangers are brought together by a mysterious job offer. They are sat down in a room with a desk and a piece of paper in front of them. An invigilator tells them the rules such as not leaving the room and whoever wins gets the job. The timer starts and the group is left to begin the exam, which consists of a single question. The trouble is when they turn over their papers they are completely blank. And the mystery begins. This is a sneaky, intriguing mystery-thriller with plenty of twists and turns to keep you guessing. You’ll be sure of a certain thing one minute but then something else will happen which will turn your suspicions elsewhere. And since each of the characters are so different from one another (each with their own morals and motivations) you can find at least one to identify with – “what would I do?” is a question that often runs through your mind. The inevitable twist ending perhaps doesn’t live up to what has come before but while you are being kept in the dark (sometimes quite literally) this is a very fun watch indeed.