Suicide Room

Dominik, the son of a wealthy family, is in his last year of school. A game he plays with a friend at a party is filmed, spreads, and makes him a target. He stops leaving the house. Online he enters a closed room run by a girl named Sylwia, where the people talk about killing themselves, and for the first time Dominik finds somewhere he belongs. For weeks his parents do not notice what he is doing on the computer. Jan Komasa wrote and directed. Jakub Gierszal stars, with Roma Gasiorowska, Agata Kulesza and Krzysztof Pieczynski. The formal invention is in the online sections. The virtual room is entirely animated and modelled on Second Life, popular at the time, and the animation is interwoven with live action. It screened in the Panorama section of the 2011 Berlin Film Festival. Opinion divided. Gierszal's performance is the part almost everyone praised; against that, the characters were called flat and the film was said to leave no residue beyond its 110 minutes. Who it is for: viewers who want a hard film about adolescence, the internet and belonging. Who it is not for: anyone with a personal connection to the subject. The film shows suicidal thinking at length and aestheticises it, and does not soften that.