The 2025 film directed by Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley is one of my favorites of last year, this write up is the result of my thoughts and a conversation with the filmmakers to get more background on what I thought made it successful as a work of art, and how it was made.
Sometimes violence isn't scary. It isn't cathartic, invigorating, sexy, or tragic. At least, not immediately. When you're used to it, it's another piece of bad news, something that eventually makes you numb. The colors of the world are dull, its people tired and uninterested. It's just not scary.
This past week I had a conversation over a video call with filmmakers and co-directors Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley about their newest film Room Temperature. In order to provide more background in this write up - which I am not calling a 'review' exactly because my primary goal is to convince as many people to see it as possible- and if you've already seen it, provide my own thoughts on it that aren't in the realm of giving a score or remarking on quality. I don't want to give an impression that affects your own viewing, since a large part of the film is that it's introspective and the viewer is meant to come to their own conclusions (this is true of all art, but it's true of this film in particular, for reasons I will explain). That said, I love it, and I love Cooper's work as a writer, so maybe there's no escaping bias.
In our conversation I wanted to stay focussed on questions about production and the practicality of making the film, since I believe that a film is communicating the themes, story, and emotion. The filmmakers' (in general) have already said what there is to be said about the story by making the film.
Inspired by DIY home haunts in California, Room Temperature depicts a 'typical' suburban family (which includes a semi-adopted French exchange student only described as their teenage son's 'friend' with much disdain) in their annual attempt to transform their house into a haunted house. The family, excluding the 'friend', consists of the nuclear formula; mother, father, older son, younger daughter.
Cooper and Farley confirmed, as they have in other press releases, that the idea came from their shared interest in home haunts. Ideally, they said, the house would have functioned as a real haunted house. I asked if there was any point in the production where a full or semi full walkthrough could be done, but for the most part each section was built and filmed separately. Though typical for a film set, the film still has the elements of a genuine home haunt in its overlapping production constraints that a real DIY haunted house may face. There is a palpable sincerity in the decor, animatronics, and costumes.
An art piece, a film, a haunted house, they all have the intentions of moving its viewer towards a feeling. Room Temperature successfully keeps its audience from caring too much about anything, in the traditional sense. One feels like a true ghostly bystander, one that can be made uncomfortable and be unable to do anything about it. This is achieved, primarily, by the performances, camerawork, and distinct lack of music in the sense of a score. Because of this approach, I was curious if Dogme 95 was an influence or something conscious in their process. They said, though not specifically Dogme 95, they are interested in making, "Conceptually rigorous work," as in, as I understand it, approaching from an artists' perspective over a traditional filmmaker's perspective. Where many filmmakers (and many successfully) fill each moment with dynamic and fast paced angles, dramatic/theatrical performances, and a score to manipulate the emotional tone; Room Temperature is quiet and measured, realism to the point of ordinariness. The purpose being, they say, to let the audience participate, and allow more room for introspection.
In terms of score, the very sparse moments of sound are created by noise artist Puce Mary. The filmmakers met her in Paris, and she had already been developing the soundscapes before filming, though the final pieces were directly influenced by the film, created in post. Removing the context of an experimental artist into the recognizable 'haunted house sound effects' is actually, truly, haunting, and completely works in the favor of creating an uncanny hyperreal narrative. It's a hill I'll die on that many current films seem to have over enthusiastic music supervisors and will use a 'cool' song to essentially create a music video to hide that the rest of the film isn't that good (extrapolation my own). Using only sounds the characters can hear add intentionality over 'aesthetic'.
In the realm of being an art piece, only one of the actors in the film is an actual actor, the rest being members of the art world - artists, gallerists, the children of gallerists, etc. The casting process consisted of meeting with the prospective actors and getting a feeling of what they were like as people, leading to directing their performances towards their real personalities. This, however, did not lead to changes in the script, it changed how it was brought to reality. The pair's first two films had deliberate ways of making the dialog appear alien, Room Temperature is the most naturalistic in its performances. Though still thoughtfully stylized by way of the script, the performances are almost eerie because of their realism. The directors were interested in 'introverted' acting, focusing mainly on facial expression and reactions over larger than life classical acting. The filmmakers mentioned that it was extremely cold on set while filming, and many of the extras (along with crew) had to stand out in the cold for hours, to which I asked if that helped with their performance. Farley says they don't believe in "torturing" actors for the purpose of getting the right reactions, but I say: whatever works, right?