An Ordeal That Stirs Both Tears and Cheers

Movies with heavyweight stars and Oscar dreams were all vying, as usual, for the coveted audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Six of the past seven award winners had gone on to receive Oscar best picture nominations, and three of them had won.

To much surprise, the award went to “Room,” a $13 million closely observed picture about a young woman imprisoned by a sexual predator in a garden shed, along with the young son she bore in captivity.

The film had audiences at both Toronto and the earlier Telluride Film Festival on their feet, applauding through tears.

The Toronto win raised the Oscar nomination chances of the stars of “Room,” Brie Larson, who plays Ma, and Jacob Tremblay, as her plucky 5-year- old, Jack. The film opens this month in the United States and elsewhere beginning in January.

An unlikely crowd-pleaser, “Room” was adapted by the Irish novelist Emma Donoghue from her 2010 best seller of the same name, inspired by the case of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian who had kept his daughter Elisabeth locked up as a sex slave in a basement for decades, with three of the seven children she had by him. Reports of their 5-year- old son’s venturing into an entirely new world, Ms. Donoghue said, put the idea in her head.

Her novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, focused on Jack’s perception of his diminutive world, a 3- by- 3- meter space he calls “Room” whose contents he anthropomorphizes: “Door” is a he, as is “Pen”; “Skylight” is a she. Jack describes his mother’s carefully constructed stories about how they got there, the nightly visits by the menacing man known as Old Nick, and their eventual breakout.

Ms. Donoghue, 45, was approached by some noted Hollywood filmmakers, but she chose the relatively unknown director Lenny Abrahamson.

Mr. Abrahamson, an Irishman who had gained acclaim for his fourth feature, the 2014 cult film “Frank,” figured his chances were slim. But he wrote Ms. Donoghue a detailed 10-page pitch, arguing that the film should be as naturalistic, sensitive and nuanced as possible, with no magical realism, animation or other fantastical ways of relaying Jack’s version of the world.

“It’s hard to resist an intelligent 10-page letter,” said Ms. Donoghue.

Mr. Abrahamson, who has two young children, said he saw “Room” as a metaphor for the way safe spaces imagined by children and maintained (usually) by parents are invariably torn away.

Ms. Larson, who starred in “Short Term 12” and as Amy Schumer’s sis-

‘Room’ is drawing attention as it moves to theaters.

ter in “Trainwreck,” auditioned for the role.

“Brie has this quality of just allowing herself to be subsumed in the character,” Mr. Abrahamson said. “She’s not trying to tell you what a great actor she is all the time.”

The real challenge was finding the right boy to play Jack. Jacob, who was in “The Smurfs 2,” landed the part after Mr. Abrahamson and his team spent months combing through audition tapes.

Mr. Abrahamson is working on a Civil War film and trying not to think about what other prizes may lie ahead. “It’s not because I’m so morally strong and incredibly unaffected by that stuff, it’s actually the opposite, because I’m weak,” he said. “I know that if I got into thinking that way, it would be really unhealthy.”