The Oak Room (2022) - Movie Review

What do you get when a brilliant writer / director sets out to do a Southern Gothic Canadian Thriller with a who’s who of Canadian character acting talent?

To Be Honest… I’m not really sure.

Let’s Discuss…

The Oak Room is a 2020 character driven thriller brought to us by writer / director Cody Calahan and writer Peter Genoway. It’s shot like a single room thriller, even though it takes place in 2 locations overall, which actually plays into the story as its revealed. While Peter Genoway is an unknown to us here at FH, Cody Calahan is one of our favorites after his brilliant direction of 2020’s Vicious Fun. While Vicious Fun was a wild, 90’s throwback Horror Black-Comedy, The Oak Room is a very different beast.

The film focuses on Paul, a small town bartender closing up his business for the night when he’s interrupted by the arrival of a young man he hoped to never see again. Steve is the son of Paul’s recently passed away best friend, who vanished for 3 years while his father got sick and died. Paul is enraged and demands that Steve pay his debts to him for all the expenses he incurred in having to pay for his friend’s funeral and cremation. When Steve balks at the idea, Paul calls a local underworld figure that Steve also owes and the clock starts. Steve has one hour to come up with reparations before the leg breaker arrives. Rather than money, Steve offers up a brutal tale of a bar much like the one he and Paul are standing in—a story that shakes Paul to the core, but will it be enough to pay off the debt? Will Steve and Paul come to terms, or will they end up like those poor souls within The Oak Room.

I highly enjoyed this film. It’s up there with PontyPool and my pleasantly surprised-o-meter.

But there is one glaring issue.

I’m going to throw this out there, RJ Mitte was the wrong choice to star in this film. Especially when he is facing down a screen legend like Peter Outerbridge. I know the name may not pop for many, but to me this guy is the Canadian equivalent of Dick Miller. He’s been in everything! I mean, look at this credits: The original 21 Jump Street, Cool Runnings, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Land of the Dead, Saw VI, The Umbrella Academy, Orphan Black, and some of my all-time favorite shows: The Nightmare Cafe (Nightmare on Elm Street the series), Forever Knight, Millennium, and Happy Town. He’s an intense performer who can go from endearing to terrifying in a blink and it’s obvious that his talents for exceed his foil in this picture. He just doesn’t have the chops to play off Outerbridge—who is on fucking fire in this film.

I know the kid was in Breaking Bad as a supporting cast member and the film probably couldn’t afford an actual headlining star—but I can’t imagine while shooting dailies that this performance looked any better. I mean Mitte plays the role with an odd speech impediment, but he drops it accidentally at points or morphs it into peanut butter mouthed prose. I haven’t seen much of Mitte before, maybe that’s just how he talks? If so, I apologize—but still, the line delivery was hard to listen to at times.

Other than this one issue, the movie is flawless. Mitte isn’t even in it as much as the real star of the film and Filthy Horrors’ favorite, Ari Millen. Millen, best known for his devilishly hilarious role as Bob in Vicious Fun and his long run on Orphan Black, brings another home run performance to the table. As a character within the story inside the story of the film. Much like in VF, Millen gets to flex his chops with some intense monologues showcasing the edge he can bring to even an affable character. At this point, if I see this guy listed in a film—I’m watching.

It fits that Millen also played the same role in the stage play version of this tale.

The rest of the cast is fantastic as well with Martin Roach and Nicholas Campbell being the main draws outside of Millen and Outerbridge. Campbell, who like Outerbridge, is a living legend having starred in the awesome Da Vinci’s Inquest, 1983’s The Dead Zone, and 1977’s A Bridge Too Far—gets to really show why he’s got 171 credits to his name. He provides my favorite moment of the film, a tense story about a dark hitchhiking experience that colored the rest of his life. He tells the story, slipping into the same speech impediment that Mitte uses—which is a nice touch.

It’s also a cool juxtaposition that both father and son tell this same bartender two very different, but altogether unsettling stories and different times in his life.

The film feels like the bastard son of Fargo and Death of a Salesman and I’m into it.

There’s no special effects to speak of, but BY GOD does this original score SLAP! Steph Copeland out does herself yet again with an incredible arrangement here. The music is its own character here. I can’t imagine this film without it, which is an odd thing to say in a dialogue heavy film as many times music gets in the way—but here it flows with the dialogue building and crashing with the moods of our participating characters.

The film is shot beautifully with every frame being crisp and clean, reflecting the harsh cold surrounding the bars.

I highly recommend this film for anyone who enjoys a slow burn mystery.

Now, without further ado….

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SPOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRSSSSSSSSSSS

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So this film ends on kinds of a WTF moment, or does it?

The trick to this movie is all in the way the story is told. Steve starts his story in the middle, and then has to go back to the beginning to make it all make sense.

That was the hint.

You see the movie starts at the ending. We see Steve’s beer bottle on the bar, glowing with a pale orange light as an act of brutality happens behind the bar. Due to the various beer bottle placements on bars during the scenes in The Oak Room, we think that this is a reference to when Michael kills the original bartender of the Oak Room during the story, but it’s not the same type of beer, it’s not the same bottle, nor the same bar. If you watch closely, the bar in the beginning scroll is Paul’s bar from the end of the film. The person being beaten to death behind the bar is actually Paul. The reason Steve didn’t stress Paul’s call to the local mafioso, was that he knew the hitman Michael was coming. He knew he needed to keep Paul in the bar until Michael, who went to the wrong bar previously—and killed the wrong bartender, arrived. Like his father said, he’d fallen in with a bad crowd—some real dark shit. When the headlights poured into the bar windows, Steve exited stage left with his father’s ashes, his job done.

That’s the main interpretation I’ve seen doing research on the play and film, but I kind of like the games the film plays. The film makes you think, at least for a while that Steve is the hitman, that the story he is telling is a description of what he’s going to do to Paul. I mean, Michael talks about having to travel to visit his sick father who he had a falling out with, much like Steve—however, Michael tells the story of living on the pig farm. Steve didn’t grow up on a pig farm, as Gordon (his father), mentions multiple times that he’s owned the same mechanic shop for 28 years. Steve isn’t old enough to have been the age Michael was in his pig story—which means they are two separate characters.

I like that this film respects the audience enough to not dump exposition and try to connect all the dots for us.

I like challenging films.

Go watch this movie on Amazon Prime Video as soon as you can.