Room’s Jacob Tremblay stars as Auggie, an unspeakably cute, indelibly clever 10-year-old with a facial disfigurement, in this adaptation of RJ Palacio’s 2012 novel. Homeschooled up until this point, his parents (Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson) decide to send him to middle school, where he is speedily eviscerated by a pack of pre-teen bullies led by smooth-talking trust fund kid Julian (Bryce Gheisar). It’s hard not to feel a lump rising in the throat when Auggie cries “Why do I have to be so ugly!”, in response to the casual cruelty of his classmates, who christen him “Barf Hideous” (an unfortunate pun on Star Wars’ Darth Sidious) on his first day. But writer-director Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) doesn’t spend too much time letting his squeaky-voiced hero wallow, gifting him with several new best friends: the puppyish Jack Will (Noah Jupe) and the brightly optimistic Summer (Millie Davis), whose combined kindness helps Auggie to bloom.
It’s a little mawkish, but Chbosky, a YA institution himself, has a gift for understanding young people and the nuances of their relationships. This is drawn out in the performances from the child actors, but also in a storyline involving Auggie’s older sister Via (Izabela Vidovic), an introverted wallflower who gracefully accepts that Auggie is the sun that her family orbits around but secretly, desperately craves validation from her parents. Organising the narrative into chapters that move between the points of view of several of the young characters helps to flesh out their particularities.
