Room 6
Horror film never manages to find its legs

Part medical paranoia horror, part dream-fueled mystery, part things that go-bump-in-badly-lit-corridors, Room 6 is a horror film that never seems able to decide on what it wants to be. I know in advance of writing this review that the more I discuss it, the more it will completely fall apart, so there seems little point in cataloging all the things that don't work. Suffice it to say the movie is a mess; it does not hold together.

As the film opens, Amy is a young woman with a serious hospital phobia. She hates hospitals. The reason she hates them and the film's theme of guilt and redemption is something that is only truly dealt with in the film's closing minutes. The rest of the film, with the aforementioned mish-mash of horror clichés, plays as non-sequiter. Subtract all the horror and fantasy elements from the film and what exactly is the story being told? Fantasy elements are tools to highlight and accentuate the story, they are never, in themselves, the story itself.

The fact is, the film is constantly in the process of canceling itself out. What does element X have to do with Element Y? Why is this scene suddenly being played as dark humor? Why is this next scene taking on a different tone? Even assuming — and there is good reason to do so — that the film is supposed to work in the realm of dream logic, it doesn't hold together. It's as if at the end of the 'Wizard of Oz' the Scarecrow asked, "What have you learned, Dorothy?" and Dorothy answered, "I learned to watch for high interest rates and hidden charges attached to my credit cards." Huh? And with that in mind the flying monkeys represented... what exactly?

That would pretty much summarize my reaction to Room 6. Huh? What again? What's that you say now? The more you think about it, the more it falls apart.

All in all, you could do worse than watching Room 6, but you could easily do better.