In the Room Where He Waits

The film has some good acting. The score is good. The story? Not so good.

It took me a good while to figure out why the protagonist. Tobin, was not allowed out of his room, because there is little to no hint in the script.

Presumably, it's because he recently came to Australia for his dad's funeral, and is in mandated quarantine during the Covid epidemic. But that's never made fully clear in the movie.

Unless I'm just dense, there's also little to no hints in the script about why what is happening in the movie is going on.

There are just too many unknowns in this film, and in the end, I still didn't really understand exactly what happened, or what the point of it was.

Yes, there are inner demons that come from our pasts, and those play a part in this film. Yet, they might be just too subtle. Too deeply hidden. Not enough explanation to clearly see or understand them.

In the film, Tobin is rehearsing for a part of Tom in "The Glass Menagerie." Maybe you'll see parallels between Tom and Tobin. I thought the more obvious parallel was with Tom's broken sister, Laura. But that doesn't begin to explain the goings on in the film.

I suppose one could mine the film deeply for meaning. Maybe I missed some of it. But I just didn't think it was worth all the effort of trying to figure out exactly what was being represented by objects, such as a recurring red shirt and a pair of cufflinks, to spend too much analytical effort on it.

I read some mainstream reviews of the film, which clearly thought more highly of it than I did. So you might be enthralled by this one.

If you're game, you'll have to dig the meanings out of the mine yourself, because I don't think the screenplay will explain it to you.