Lenny Abrahamson to direct Emma Donoghue’s best-selling novel “Room”

PanARMENIAN.Net - What Richard Did director Lenny Abrahamson is set to helm the adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s best-selling novel Room, Deadline said.

Donoghue is writing the script. Ed Guiney of Ireland-based Element Films is producing. The story follows a 5-year-old who grows up in an 11-by-11 shed he believes to be the whole world as his young mother has shielded him from the truth that they are captives.The book is shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and has sold 2.5 million copies in English and been translated into 35 other languages.

“Everything about Emma Donoghue's "Room" sounds mawkish and sadistic, as though she's arriving late to the popular genre of child-abuse thrillers that Maureen Corrigan recently lamented in our pages. But don't bother if those lurid books are your thing, and please keep reading if you'd enjoy one of the most affecting and subtly profound novels of the year,” a review published at Washington Post says.

“The Irish-born Donoghue has written eccentric, otherworldly stories before ("Slammerkin" is probably her best known), but "Room" -- shortlisted for the Booker Prize -- should appeal to an even larger audience. Not too cute, not too weirdly precocious, not a fey mouthpiece for the author's profundities, Jack expresses a poignant mixture of wisdom, love and naivete that will make you ache to save him -- whatever that would mean: Delivering him to the outside world? Keeping him preserved here forever? But until you finish it, beware talking about "Room" with anyone who might clumsily strip away the suspense that's woven through its raw wonder. You need to enter this small, harrowing place prepared only to have your own world expanded,” the review concludes.

Abrahamson is in postproduction on Frank, a comedy starring Domhnall Gleeson, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Michael Fassbender.

UTA negotiated the film rights on behalf of the author and publishing agents Kathy Anderson and Caroline Davidson.