‘The Immaculate Room’ Review: Kate Bosworth and Emile Hirsch Imprison Themselves in a White Room for $5 Million

You possibly can name “The Immaculate Room” the final word lockdown film, or perhaps the spa model of “Noticed.” It’s a chicly austere and, at stray moments, provocative tabloid thriller during which Kate (Kate Bosworth) and Mikey (Emile Hirsch), as a part of a mysterious contest, comply with spend 50 days dwelling in a big naked white room. Once they first stroll in, they’re greeted by a Siri voice, British and feminine, who makes ritual pronouncements like “It’s night. Take pleasure in your keep within the Immaculate Room.” In the event that they make it by means of all 50 days, they’ll get $5 million in prize cash. (If solely certainly one of them makes it, the reward will get lowered to $1 million.) It doesn’t sound all that tough, like two months of voluntary jail time minus the filth and hazard. And that’s the hook: Who wouldn’t do that for $5 million? However the truth that it sounds so do-able means the viewers is asking from minute one: What’s the catch?

In a humorous manner, “The Immaculate Room” is a parable of boredom, which makes it a narrative for our time. Kate and Mikey have a flat white mattress to sleep on, however principally they’ve received white partitions and nothing else. The place seems to be like an empty art-museum gallery (you may nearly see the Gerhard Richter work that might be hanging there), or an unfurnished boutique apartment designed by Steve Jobs. A small milk container marked FOOD sits in its slot like an Apple product. Within the container is a gooey flavorless liquid: sustenance stripped of enjoyment. “Not precisely Shake Shack,” says Mikey after taking a swig. Consuming is not any enjoyable, however greater than that there’s no diversion. In jail you may learn a ebook. “The Immaculate Room” is a film made for a world of individuals fatally hooked on leisure that asks: What when you had none? Wouldn’t it step by step drive you nuts?

So what’s there to curiosity the viewers? For starters, there are two energetic actors, wearing designer surgical scrubs (olive inexperienced for her, rust for him), taking part in out the cleaning soap opera of Kate and Mikey. Hirsch, extra dynamic than he was, makes Mikey a spoiled, surly hipster brat of an artist with a chip on his shoulder about his vegan way of life. He appears to resent others, however when he finds a bug within the room he’s determined to feed and nurture it. Bosworth’s Kate is extra modest, grounded, and controlling. She begins every day with a twelve-step prayer (“My identify is Katherine Frith and immediately’s my day”) and meditates within the Sukhasana place. However she’s a New Age materialist. She desires that $5 million and is dedicated to the excessive rationality of doing something it takes to get it.

The 2 have a troubled relationship, and getting in on this contest appears to be their try and heal it. Speak about a doomed plan! As quickly as we study that the competition was designed by a billionaire scientist, Professor Voyenne (if this film had been the much less spartan model of itself, he’d seem on a video display and be performed by Woody Harrelson), we notice that Kate and Mikey are guinea pigs in a Skinner field who’re dwelling out somebody’s concept of a behavior-mod experiment.

There are occasions in “The Immaculate Room” after we really feel similar to the 2 of them: stranded in a land of nothing, questioning how we’re going to get by means of the following second and the one after that. However the movie’s writer-director, Mukunda Michael Dewil, is aware of that he can’t make a drama about monotony that falls sufferer to the imitative fallacy. So he introduces exterior parts, which is a pleasant manner of claiming he’s dishonest. Kate and Mikey are allowed to purchase two “treats,” shock packages that can relieve the tedium. They’re costly (the primary one shaves $100,000 off the prize cash, the second $250,000), and the primary deal with is simply…a inexperienced crayon. (To Mikey the artist, it’s a present.) However the treats develop wilder from there. At one level a pistol seems out of nowhere. It ought to have are available one other Apple field, this one marked “Chekhov’s gun.”

“The Immaculate Room” begins out as a parable of boredom and ends as a parable of greed. But satirically, it’s most attention-grabbing when it is about boredom. When it turns into “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” remade as a claustrophobic actuality present, it turns into banal. In the long run, the viewers has to reply the query that’s put to the characters: Will we care extra concerning the $5 million or them? I confess I wound up with the mistaken reply.