The Oak Room: A guy walks into a bar with stories about other guys walking into bars - with grim, mordant results

 By Jim Slotek

Rating: B

With straight-from-the-stage awards season fodder like One Night In Miami and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, I’ve debated lately with people who strongly feel a movie should be something more than a story, however great.

If I have to choose, my feeling is that I’d rather watch a great story that’s little more than a play on a screen, than something stylish but narratively empty.

RJ Mitte plays an unwelcome bar visitor in The Oak Room.

In that same vein, the claustrophobic Canadian thriller The Oak Room is not much of a film, technically speaking. But it is a terrific and dark piece of storytelling by writer Peter Genoway that could be told around a campfire, performed onstage or embellished onscreen (“Goose the truth!” as Peter Outerbridge’s character Paul describes it).

It’s a movie about two guys in a Kirkland Lake bar on a snowy night, exchanging increasingy unsettling stories about other guys telling stories in other bars on snowy nights, so that with a few exceptions, the entire movie takes place in one bar or another. 

Underscoring the whole thing is an initially unexplained opening in – yes - a bar, where somebody is clearly being beaten and maybe killed off-camera while we look at an empty beer bottle. The message to take, however these stories end, is that they all connect in a dire place.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Paul is closing his bar when a visitor appears, oblivious to the unwelcome of his presence. The intruder is Steve (RJ Mitte, who played Walt White Jr. in Breaking Bad), a prodigal black sheep and self-described drifter who’d been away mysteriously for three years. He hadn’t even returned to attend the funeral of his father Gord (Nicholas Campbell, whom we meet in another bout of barroom storytelling).

Gord was Paul’s best friend, so his dislike of Steve is palpable. Paul immediately demands money owed, and Steve instead offers, “something better,” a story.

Unimpressed with Steve’s opener - about a rich urbanite (Martin Roach) looking to warm up in a closing bar, and hearing a childhood farm tale from a vaguely hostile bartender (Ari Millen) – Paul answers with one of his own. This one comes posthumously from Gord, who is recalled telling barflies the story of a grim, Death-like driver who’d picked him up as a twentysomething hitchhiker and sent him away with a few words about Hell.

That these stories all connect is no surprise. That they don’t do so neatly is also okay by me (the ending left me with some questions). All we know throughout is that someone is barrelling down the snowy highway toward Paul’s bar. It’s implied it could be someone else Steve owes money to. Or it could be someone else.

This story about stories is best absorbed if you’re not in a hurry. The Oak Room is not long (88 minutes), but the words demand attention.

The Oak Room. Directed by Cody Calahan. Written by Peter Genoway. Starring, RJ MItte, Peter Outerbridge and Ari Millen. Now available on VOD.