Audience reaction was rapturous: the emotion in the room was palpable.  And how could it not be when faced with so honest a representation of the difficulties of human existence—portrayed in microcosm through the tragic tale of Johnny (Tommy Wiseau), his beloved fiancée Lisa (Juliette Danielle), and their respective friend and lover Mark (Greg Sestero).

 Yes, this is reality at its most uncompromising and truthful.  After all, would your dialogue be any more natural when telling your mother, during one of her 47 second visits, that you no longer love your husband-to-be?  Does your routine loveless sex look any more attractive, or feature better continuity?  Of course not.

 No, rarely has the human psyche been so remarkably and idiosyncratically portrayed in cinematic form.  And Tommy Wiseau is to thank, in his impressive role as writer-director-actor-producer—all of which he performs with such lightness of touch that it is impossible to see his technique in any one of his chosen fields.  This can be said of all the performers, whose understanding of their characters ascends the need for common notions of ‘believability’, questioning the nature of film itself.

 For, like Brecht before him, Wiseau’s oeuvre is one of alienation.  Thus we find the dramatic bathos represented by Mike (Mike Holmes), a moving character whose epiphany is effected, Macbeth-like, by guilt, induced not by such hackneyed contrivances as murder or theft, but by Lisa’s mother (Carolyn Minnott) seeing his underwear.  To watch Mike’s tragic fall (albeit a fall against trashcans when fate throws him a football slightly too hard) is to gaze into the very mouth of a truth which straddles the barrier between banality and melodrama.

 And all of it played out, with an inexplicability only real life can provide, in the titular Room—a symbol, no doubt, of the claustrophobic hold it has upon each of our characters’ mindsets, and on the budget required for filmsets.  Never will I see such honesty on camera again: I defy the most hardened not to enjoy it.