The opening scenes of Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley’s Room Temperature (2025) establish the unusual nature of its setting and the film’s approach to it. Yellow lights pulse through a house’s windows, as if dancing to noise musician Puce Mary’s soundtrack. The film then cuts to a close-up of a teenage boy being strangled and stabbed, blood spurting over him. The lighting is so bright it makes the yard look artificial. The entire film turns a corner of southern California’s desert into an unearthly landscape. It avoids all the received notions its premise, about a family who operate a haunt out of their house each Halloween, brings to mind. While it borrows some narrative and visual ideas from horror films, it isn’t exactly one.
Dad (John Williams) is passionate about transforming his family’s house into a bloody spectacle every year. It’s a ritual that holds great meaning for him, even when his efforts fail. At one point, attracted by flashing lights and the smoke pouring out of it, the local school’s janitor Paul (Chris Olson) invites himself over. He becomes part of the household, which includes Dad’s wife Beatrice (Stanya Khan), son Andre (Charlie Nelson Jacobs), daughter Marguerite (Virginia Adams), and Extra (Ange Dargent), a French teenager who arrived when he was 8 and never left. The brief run-up to the presentation of the haunt is full of tension, which later yields real violence.
The camera movements and editing of Room Temperature are unmoored from standard film grammar, although this takes a while to sink in. For example, a long shot of Andre singing cuts to a close-up of the side of his face. Elsewhere, the editing sutures together entirely different spaces within the house and its surrounding yard. Midway through the film, one realizes that if the camera represents anyone's perspective, it must be that of a ghost.
Cooper and Farley have an eye for images that creep one out, even if they don’t contain anything sinister in them necessarily. The former, who began as an author, has talked about the importance Robert Bresson holds for his work as a writer and a filmmaker. The directing duo has always worked with non-professional actors and their sparse dialogue is rarely delivered with the degree of affect the film’s events seem to demand. This is a corollary to the vernacular teenage voice Cooper’s novels have so often deployed, but here it has the effect of denaturalizing the story. Without becoming a movie explicitly about abuse, it suggests the long-term impact of living amidst casual cruelty and a family more concerned with control than love.
Room Temperature screens this evening, December 14, at the Roxy. Directors Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley will be in attendance for a Q&A.
