The Oak Room is a rather fascinating case of seeming mediocrity turning into a surprise, suddenly engaging film in the last act. I wasn’t sure what I was getting into… though, after seeing it, the idea that it was listed as “horror” in iTunes is a bit of a laugh. A thriller or suspense film yes… horror… I have my doubts.

So the film is about (say it with me) a guy who walks into a bar… and proceeds to tell a story that itself has a guy who walks into a bar. And that seems to be what the film is about… spinning yarns, telling stories, and often not being sure what the point of any of this is. But stories nested within stories that start over, start at the end, and have debates about whether stories need to be punched up to hold interest.

And, yeah, this is certainly a clever idea… but I think the vast bulk of the movie fails in the long run. It’s not that the acting is bad – it’s fine. It’s not that the cinematography is bad… it’s atmospheric. It’s that the dialog is just bland… this amount of talk needed to be more snappy, more clever, funnier, more menacing… more more more of something that it wasn’t. It needed to crackle but instead it just droned.

But, hell, ultimately all the storytelling and digressions reaches a point and I was suddenly hooked. I was bored for most of the first two acts, but the sudden turn it takes at the end really worked for me. Saves the movie, in fact. Doesn’t cause it to go into the stratosphere but, hey, three out of five stars ain’t bad when it was heading for a two.

Score: 76