Movie Review: 'Room 203' Hopes You Are Afraid of the Dark

Room 203 is yet another horror movie that mistakes darkness for atmosphere. This by the numbers exercise in haunted house and demon possession tropes is, at times, so dark, in terms of what you can see, that trying to follow the story is impossible. Perhaps the movie might look better on a big screen, but watching on a professionally set up HD Television, I felt like I was staring into a dark room while stock music played.

Room 203 stars Francesca Xuereb as Kim and Viktoria Vinyarski as Izzy, best friends who are moving in together. The two have found a cheap apartment in a big city and despite Kim’s parents' objection, they’ve jumped to move in together. Kim’s parents don’t want her living with Izzy because Izzy has struggled with drug abuse and they don’t want Kim being dragged down by caring for her best friend’s addiction.

Kim, meanwhile, has an ulterior motive in living with Izzy. While she wants to take care of her best friend, she’s also a young college student majoring in journalism and part of her course is writing a personal story about her friend struggling with addiction. Izzy is not aware that Kim is writing about her and seems oblivious to her own problems as she spends her days going on dead acting auditions and her nights partying.

The inciting incident for the horror portion of the plot of Room 203 involves a hole in the wall of Kim and Izzy’s apartment. Izzy sees the hole and cannot resist reaching inside. What she finds is a necklace that she claims for herself. The apartment also has a haunted stained glass window that kills people. Though the creepy landlord, Ronan (Scott Gremillion), doesn’t mention the killing window, he does say not to touch it. We know it’s a killer window because of a pre-credits scene involving the previous tenants, one of them touched the window and then killed herself.

Spooky stuff starts happening, Izzy swirls more and more out of control, and Kim uses her research skills, with the help of a fellow student and love interest, Ian (Eric Wiegand), to discover the history of the apartment. The history involves a lot of deaths, a demon of some sort, and it all traces back to the creepy landlord. This is strange since the movie does more to establish the apartment as the big evil than it does the landlord. The landlord becomes a de facto villain late in the movie when the action leaves the apartment.

Room 203 is loosely based on a novel by Kamon Nanami and was adapted and directed by Ben Jagger in his third feature outing. Jagger has taken the bones of Nanami’s novel and made a highly rudimentary horror movie, indistinct from dozens of other haunted house movies or demon possession movies. The main takeaway from Jagger’s effort in Room 203 is that he likes shooting movies in the dark. Jagger and cinematographer Joel Froome craft scenes in Room 203 that are so dark that watching them is a chore, many scenes are so dark that you can’t make out anything that is happening.

I get that shooting in darkness saves on the budget side of things, lighting a room, decorating it, these can be very expensive, but making a movie so dark that the audience is lost is not a better option. I get what they are going for, in some ways you want the audience to be as disoriented as the actors, but this needs to be established as what you are trying to accomplish. In Room 203, darkness feels like an excuse to save money on set design and lighting and not a necessary story choice.

If you enjoy staring into darkness as stock music plays and characters act out the clichés of haunted house and demon possession movies, then perhaps Room 203 is for you. It’s definitely not for me. Room 203 opens in limited release on Friday, April 15th, 2022.