Diksha Sundriyal
2015’s ‘Room’ begins on the fifth birthday of a boy named Jack. He has spent his entire life inside a room with his mother, Joy Newsome, who has been imprisoned there for seven years by a man they call Old Nick. As we follow the daily routine of Jack and Joy, Old Nick remains a vague figure. He only appears at night and brings supplies, but Jack never meets him because his mother doesn’t deem it right. It takes some time for Jack to understand who Old Nick really is and what he has stolen from him and his mother. The film presents a heartwrenching story of the boy and his mother, making one wonder whether a man like Old Nick exists.
Old Nick is Loosely Inspired by Josef Fritzl
Old Nick is a fictional character created by Emma Donoghue for her novel, ‘Room,’ which serves as the source material for the film. While the author has said that the character is entirely made-up, she also stated that she was inspired to write the film after she read about the Fritzl case. It came to light in 2008 when a woman named Elisabeth Fritzl revealed that her father, Josef Fritzl, had held her captive for 24 years in a hidden basement in the house where he lived with his wife and Elisabeth’s mother. For all these years, he sexually abused his daughter, who bore seven of his children, one of whom died shortly after birth. While three children remained in the basement with Elisabeth, Josef found a way to get the other three officially adopted by lying to the authorities and her wife about them being left on their door by an unknown person.
Josef hid the truth about Elisabeth by concocting a story about her running away from home to join a cult. He forced her to write letters indicating that she had left town and would not be coming back. His wife, Rosemarie, and the cops accepted this explanation due to Elisabeth’s prior cases of running away from home. With no suspicion lingering on him, Josef regularly visited his daughter in the hidden basement and abused her. He had fitted the room with essentials to allow Elisabeth and her children to survive and would stock up on supplies regularly. He also scared them into submission so that they wouldn’t try to escape or try anything else.
The truth about Josef’s crimes came to light when one of the children in the basement fell grievously sick and had to be taken to the hospital, where the staff became suspicious of Josef’s story about who the patient really was. They alerted the cops when Josef brought Elisabeth to the hospital, and finally, the girl and her children were free of the torment that Josef had put them through. He was charged with rape, incest, false imprisonment, and manslaughter by negligence for the death of one of Elisabeth’s children. He pleaded guilty in 2009 and has been serving life imprisonment ever since, mostly spending his days in a psychiatric facility.
Emma Donoghue Didn’t Want Old Nick to Have the Limelight in the Story
When Emma Donoghue thought about writing ‘Room,’ she knew it had to be about Joy and Jack, not the kidnapping. Especially not about Old Nick and why and how he did what he did. The author was well aware of the “cultural obsession” with dark and interesting characters, and she had no intention of painting Old Nick that way. She didn’t want to get into his mind, presenting him through the lens of someone like Dexter Morgan for the true crime fans to obsess over. Rather, she wants Old Nick to remain in the shadow as much as possible so that the audience doesn’t see him properly until it is time for Jack to escape.
It is to keep him a stranger to the audience that Donoghue didn’t even give him a proper name. In the story, he is only known as “Old Nick,” and neither Joy nor Jack knows his real name. The author didn’t even try to broach the subject in the story because she wanted to keep that sense of unfamiliarity between the character and the audience. However, this doesn’t mean she didn’t think about how to address him.
Owing to her Catholic upbringing, when Donoghue thought about a single mother trying to protect her fatherless child from a bad man, her mind immediately went to Mary and Jesus, with the bad man being Satan. She revealed that she wanted to give him “a devilish nickname” and settled on “Old Nick” because that is the slang for the devil where she comes from. The author also subconsciously ended up with religious undertones in the story, which added more weight to the narrative.
Donoghue also wanted to clarify that while the Fritzl case may have inspired her to write the story, the characters are not based on the real people involved. She consciously tried to make Old Nick as different from Josef Fritzl as possible. This included making him American (as opposed to Fritzl being Austrian), and had him abduct a stranger rather than his own daughter. To make things more vague, she gave no indication whatsoever about Old Nick’s family and, as intended, kept him almost entirely on the sidelines, putting more focus on Joy and Jack, which is where the heart of the story lies.
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