‘The Immaculate Room’ Review: Kate Bosworth & Emile Hirsch Star As A Couple Competing For $5 Million In An Indie Dud

“Welcome, Katherine Frith (Kate Bosworth) and Michael Walsh (Emile Hirsch). You have been chosen to spend 50 days in the Immaculate Room and will win $5 million by completing the task. If one of you leaves, the prize money drops to $1 million for the person that remains. Enjoy your stay in the Immaculate Room.” So intones the HAL-like intelligence that monitors the Immaculate Room—a white-walled, white-floored, white-everythinged space (with stylish en suite), into which meals are dispensed via blank milk cartons, and over the door of which looms an ominous 50-day timer. On that précis alone, Mukunda Michael Dewil’s latest effort would seem to promise an infallible sane-to-mad narrative arc, replete with all the geyserine outbursts and pulpy thrills of films like “Would You Rather” and “Escape Room.” Alas, the action rarely bubbles beyond Kate and Mikey’s lame jealousies, flimsy traumatic backstories, and petty squabbles about veganism and portraiture. What we get instead is a banal morality tale about how money can’t buy happiness nor technology truly connect us—save one robot dog, it’s an imitation of “Black Mirror.”

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Anyone who has seen “Squid Game,” or “Would You Rather,” or “Choose or Die” will surely wonder who or what is behind the Immaculate Room. Given that the action is set in present-day (non-dystopian) America, and given that the Immaculate Room is, as Mikey mentions, some kind of reality TV show, you’d think that the sanity and identity of the Room’s crazed mastermind would bear on the plot in some way. Not so. This depraved puppet master is mentioned only in passing, and always with a peculiar reverence (his evasiveness is construed as mystique; his love of torture chalked up to eccentricity). “Professor Voyen,” or simply “The Professor,” as Mikey calls him, is a nebulous public figure who once conducted an infamous experiment—later made into a popular film—in which he spent $150 million to make a blue-collar family from Middle America “Kardashian-famous.” The consequences were fatal: “She [mother] shot him [father] after finding him in bed with another woman and went to jail for murder; the son fell off the planet; and the daughter ended up OD-ing on heroin.” How exactly this Jigsaw lunatic is allowed to roam free is simply glossed over in Dewil’s script, which frequently appeals to reality in one scene and then detaches itself from it the next. “He’s [Voyen] intrigued by the human condition,” says Mikey. Well, that clears things up.

Predictably, as the days and weeks tick by, the couple’s expanse of white nothing turns from calm retreat—and easy moneymaker—to a kind of solitary confinement by way of Tadao Ando. (Cinematographer Rasa Partin deserves credit here: he somehow manages to mirror the couple’s psychosis with Caligarian off-kilter shots and rouging strips of lambent light without it ever looking garish or contrived.) Mikey soon exhausts all his small entertainments—running laps around the room; playing pat-a-cake with Kate; staring at the walls—while an upsetting video message from home (another of Voyen’s legally questionable mind games) sends Kate into a bed-bound stupor. Here Dewil tries to steer the action out of the clichéd and into the unknown by having Mikey use up his two allotted (though very expensive) treats. For the first he receives a green crayon, which he then uses to decorate the walls with caricatures, Van Gogh-ish crows, and a giant perched eagle; for the second, the white doors part and in walks birthday-suited Simone (Ashley Greene Khoury), an actress paid by Voyen to bewitch Mikey and rile up Kate.

And Voyen gets his wish: Mikey’s shameless cozying up to Simone quickly drives Kate to buy her first treat—three tablets of ecstasy, which she kindly shares with her Immaculate Roommates. After the drug takes hold, Mikey is consumed by the memory of his brother’s drowning and the guilt for how, in his intoxicated state, he failed to save him. While these unhinged, fluorescent, “Climax”-y few minutes count as some of the most dynamic in the picture, they also show just how limp and leisurely the rest of the action is. As an out-and-out thriller, the twists are much too tame and predictable (the film features one of the most conspicuous and literal uses of Chekhov’s gun I’ve ever seen), and its conflicts are too staggered, too circadian to sustain any great tension; like Kate and Mikey, we wait around for the next calamity as soon as the fake sun comes up. (And to make matters worse, just when it seems like Voyen is indulging his sadism, he sheepishly relents; and then we’re back to staring at walls again.) Likewise, as a more cerebral, introspective piece about confronting repressed memories, the picture is again too restrained in its approach; one childhood flashback each does not constitute a tempestuous Freudian drama.

Bizarrely, if “The Immaculate Room” is a remake or retelling of anything, it’s of the fall of man in Genesis, with Voyen as God, the room as Eden, and the cash prize as the corrupting fruit. The film’s sexual politics certainly seem to accord with this reading: Mikey is creative, funny, and ambitious (with his share of the prize he wants, somewhat Barton Finkishly, to “Make art, real art…give the downtrodden a voice,” in addition to “starting schools for the villagers in Zimbabwe”); meanwhile Kate has two contrasting, though equally vacant, guises: the first: quiet, passive, and uninspired (“I’m going to invest”); the second: greedy, resentful, and murderous. It’s she who’s continually blamed and villainized when things go awry, and even when she does win, it’s in service of her abusive, alcoholic father. (Simone, too, in her shallow, serpentine role, is written entirely without agency or scruples; her sole function is to tempt Mikey with her body and thereby hasten Kate’s mental decline.) Make no mistake, Bosworth and Hirsch give their all in this film, but no amount of fiery insult-slinging or saccharine ‘How we first met’ details can make this stale script seem new. The tropes aren’t just old, they’re antediluvian. [C-]