Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sapeña, “Fermat’s Room” (2009)
Three brilliant mathematicians and an inventor, each already having solved a difficult problem, are invited to dinner together with a mysterious host called Fermat (Federico Luppi) in a barn on a remote island. Given pseudonyms of Galois, Hilbert, Oliva and Pascal, the foursome enjoy their meal with Fermat who then invites them to solve an enigma. Suddenly Fermat’s cellphone rings, he answers and has to excuse himself from the meeting in order to go to hospital to see his injured daughter. While he is gone, the guests discover he has locked the door and they are trapped; another cellphone and they answer it to find out that they are to solve a series of mental puzzles and riddles, each within one minute. If they run out of time or get the wrong answer, the walls in the room move towards them, shrinking the room. The quartet quickly realise they must solve the riddles and at the same time work out why they have been brought together by Fermat in the one place to be killed.
The actual puzzles in the film are not very complicated and many viewers will be able to solve them faster than the supposed geniuses do, though they have the luxury of not facing certain death if they take their time or get a wrong answer. The film quickly slips into a formula with Oliva (Elena Ballesteros) doing most of the brainwork on the riddles while the other characters (played by Lluis Homar, Santi Millan and Alejo Sauras) try to work out the connections among themselves and between one another and Fermat. In the meantime as the room becomes smaller, the guests try to stop the unseen hydraulic presses from pushing the walls closer to them by piling and arranging the furniture in ways to counteract the push. Past professional jealousies, the single-minded pursuit of an answer to an age-old intellectual enigma, an unfaithful lover, a car running into a pedestrian and other personal peccadilloes arise in the various back-stories that the foursome spill out to one another.
As might be expected the plot contains a red herring and a twist in that the real villain is not who the foursome suppose him to be. The twist relates to the general theme of professional rivalry and single-minded competition, and the fear that one’s lifework, built up over many years, even decades, can be eclipsed or demolished by a young upstart’s brilliant discovery. After the twist, the film then becomes a mad dash to escape the room with perhaps not even half the riddles the guests are supposed to solve having been completed. The true climax actually comes very close to the end of the film with those guests who have managed to escape pondering whether some papers they have taken with them should be published under one person’s name or another name. Some viewers will be able to guess that there is a third alternative.
In spite of the action taking place in just one ever-shrinking room, the movie doesn’t feel at all claustrophobic and the characters remain more or less level-headed as they work out the puzzles and work out their connections to one another. This can be a disadvantage to some people’s enjoyment of the movie: they may find the relative lack of emoting gives the impresson of the guests as being not too concerned with their dilemma. The acting can be uneven and Homar and Millan, playing Hilbert and Pascal respectively, flesh their characters out better than the younger Ballesteros and Sauras who play the young ex-lovers Oliva and Galois. Some viewers may query why two mathematicians have to be young and, in Galois’s case, tempestuous and testosterone-charged; they probably need to read something of the life of the real Évariste Galois, the brilliant mathematician who died at the age of 20 in a duel fought on behalf of a woman.
There is suspense and the puzzle-solving can be very absorbing and entertaining so the film moves more quickly than a synopsis of the plot would suggest. The whole project might have worked better and with more depth if there were more players (two, maybe three more people would do) and the room had been expanded to a maze with shifting walls. There could be a couple of deaths along the way – they need not be shown in all their gory glory – which would ratchet up the suspense and tension. The characters could have tried to beat the game rather than go along with it, with consequences both beneficial and detrimental to their survival. As it is, being Piedrahita and Sapena’s first full-length feature film together and made on a small budget, “Fermat’s Room” is an entertaining if not very satisfying film. The conclusion can be very hurried and some loose ends remain, well, loose.