Emile Hirsch’s career has never really lived up to the glowing predictions made 18 years ago when he starred in the teen sex comedy The Girl Next Door opposite 24’s Elisha Cuthbert. It looked like it might have been over altogether after he was briefly imprisoned for an aggravated nightclub assault on Paramount Pictures executive Daniele Bernfeld in 2015. However, while Hirsch no longer lands the big roles he got as a teen idol in the mid-‘00s, he still gets consistent work, including a turn as the late Jay Sebring in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. He continues to work despite being a convicted abuser of women, and while one may not go as far as some progressive commentators and bemoan that “cancel culture does not exist,” one would hope that such a deplorable act would have graver consequences for the perpetrator’s career than this incident seemingly has done for Hirsch’s. In his latest vehicle, Mukunda Michael Dewil’s The Immaculate Room, Hirsch continues to earn a living, but it’s justifiably unlikely to return him to the A-list.
The film tells the story of Mike (Hirsch) and Kate (Kate Bosworth), a couple in their thirties who win the chance to earn $5 million for spending 50 days inside a room with no TV, Internet or other entertainment, and only the most basic liquid food for nutritional subsistence. Little information is given as to the origin of this scheme, but it is ostensibly some sort of experiment being carried out by psychologists rather than a Big Brother-style reality TV show. Boredom begins to quickly set in for the couple, and we get the sense that the prize money appeals to them because Mike is a quixotic person who has conducted his career in a rather peripatetic way, meaning that it will allow him to be as non-committal towards paid employment as he likes.
And therein lies The Immaculate Room’s major problem. Because Mike is irritatingly immature, with an excess of self-worth, and Kate invariably comes across as a killjoy by comparison, it is very difficult to care about this couple and what happens to them. While art director Madeline O’Brien and production designer Greg Lang do a great job of conveying the deliberate sparseness and blankness of the film’s setting, and their strong design work is photographed by Rasa Partin very effectively, these characters are poorly qualified to be subjects of significant emotional investment by audiences.
The film might have been more resonant if it had been released a little sooner when its story of being locked down within four walls and left to one’s own devices might have made Mike and Kate more sympathetic to lockdown-fatigued audiences. As it stands, Mike and Kate’s mercenary reasons for participating in the film’s central experiment, as well as the obnoxiousness of Mike’s character and behavior, make The Immaculate Room an entirely unaffecting piece of filmmaking.
Photo courtesy of Screen Media Films
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