Review: ‘The Immaculate Room’ proves that it’s extremely boring to spend 50 days in isolation

A $5-million money prize for spending 50 days in an empty room — how arduous might that be? That is the query posed by writer-director Mukunda Michael Dewil within the intimate high-concept drama “The Immaculate Room,” starring Emile Hirsch and Kate Bosworth.

“The Immaculate Room” calls to thoughts different initiatives akin to Joseph Kosinski’s experimental drug testing drama “Spiderhead,” the sci-fi two-hander “Passengers,” and there are even shades of “Squid Sport” with the large money prize connected, although the situation is way much less violent. Or is it?

Michael (Hirsch) and Kate (Bosworth) enter the room with excessive hopes. In the event that they end out the 50 days, they break up the $5 million. If considered one of them leaves, the prize drops to $1 million. Their sustenance is a carton of mysterious liquid, “not precisely Shake Shack.” In the event that they ask for a “deal with” to alleviate the monotony, lots of of hundreds of {dollars} are shaved off the pot.

Kate imagines the time spent within the room will probably be “a second likelihood” for the couple — whose relationship has been rocky — and plans to take a position her winnings. Michael simply desires to “by no means take into consideration cash ever once more” and be free to make no matter form of artwork he desires. With a swift effectivity, Dewil lays out the scenario after which lets time, the room and these characters do the work.

Michael is chaos and Kate is management. He runs laps, she meditates. He climbs the partitions and he or she repeats affirmations. He’s the id and he or she is the ego. What number of days are left? Hours? Minutes? Will they emerge victorious, and even intact?

The room is a social experiment designed by a reclusive professor who as soon as examined the consequences of fame on a standard American household with a blockbuster documentary experiment. Although the outcomes of that challenge had been bleak, Michael stays intrigued by his work, whereas Kate is clearly motivated by the cash. However why? They each appear comfy, although the category variations between them creep in, as Kate’s managed facade cracks beneath stress.

Dewil throws in wild playing cards like messages from family members, a pistol, a unadorned lady (Ashley Greene Khoury) and ecstasy capsules to intensify the insanity that’s brewing within the room, which grows much less immaculate by the hour. However basically, it’s the boredom that will get to them, permitting long-simmering tensions, grief and resentments to bubble to the floor. It’s a captivating experiment to attempt to make a movie about boredom that isn’t boring, and Dewil doesn’t at all times handle to reach this effort.

Regardless of a few dedicated performances from Bosworth and Hirsch, and using extremely stylized montages to move the time — one a manic, rock-fueled ellipses of the pair as extremely productive, dutiful money-winners, the opposite a pink-hued, ecstasy-laden swirl of sensuality — “The Immaculate Room” assessments the viewers’s endurance as a lot because it does the characters’.

Maybe as a result of their motivations aren’t as heightened because the scenario they’re in, it’s arduous to attach with why Michael and Kate are there within the first place, and why they don’t go away. Dewil serves up an ending that’s far too pat for the darkish occasions that precede it. It’s all just a bit too immaculately rendered to be satisfying, and even compelling past the preliminary conceit.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune Information Service movie critic.