This film centers around a man called Joe Doucett, who is an alcoholic, a public nuisance,
and a generally unpleasant man.
It's 1993, he doesn’t attend his three-year-old daughter’s birthday party
and feels no remorse about it, nor does he feel any sort of obligation to see either
his wife or daughter at all. Instead, he prioritizes attending a business meeting,
during which he proceeds to act like a complete asshat as well,
by making a move on his client’s girlfriend. He ends up getting rejected by the woman,
and gets found out by the client. Suffice to say, the night doesn’t end well for him.
Now that his ego is hurt, Joe roams the streets drunk and alone. He pathetically pukes on the
pavement, and at some point decides to buy a trinket for his daughter from a street vendor.
Afterwards, he bangs on the front door of the bar he frequents,
of which belongs to his old friend, Chucky. Joe demands to be let inside and be given a drink,
but Chucky refuses because the bar is closed. Pissed, Joe walks away, but then…
he encounters a woman in the middle of the street, and that's when his life starts to change.
On the next scene, Joe wakes up in a bed, presumably after having sex with
the woman he met on the street earlier. He drowsily goes to the bathroom to pee,
while we can see and hear the sound of the shower running in the background.
However, it doesn’t take long before Joe notices something is off.
The woman is nowhere to be found. Not only that, Joe soon realizes that the cupboard is
filled with plain white clothes, and that the door is locked. He begins to panic and tries
asking for help to no avail. Soon after, a tray of food gets slid down the doggy door.
Joe forces his head through and begs to be let go, but the person simply brushes him off.
He checks out the meal given to him, which are a bunch of dumplings from a Chinese restaurant,
and a bottle of liquor.
Days go by, and the meals given to him stays the same.
It frustrates him at some point, but Joe slowly resigns to his fate as a prisoner in this strange
room, when he realizes there’s nothing else he could do. One day, he’s touching himself
to a fitness video, right when white fog seeps out of the vents, and knocks him unconscious.
While Joe is unconscious, unseen personnel enter the room and begin taking DNA samples off of him.
On the next scene, Joe learns that his wife had been raped and murdered, leaving his 3 year-old
daughter Mia to get put up for adoption. According to the newscaster, evidence found at the crime
scene have lead the police to believe that Joe was the perpetrator. To conclude, the people we saw
enter Joe’s room earlier strategically took Joe’s DNA, and later planted them all over the crime
scene. The news clearly enrages Joe, who is not at all guilty for his wife’s rape, let alone murder.
Days turn into months and the desperately lonely Joe even goes as far as smearing his
pillow with blood, forming what looks like a badly-drawn cartoon face. Not only that,
he befriends a white rat in the room, until one day the rat gives birth to a litter of pinkies.
Joe falls asleep next to his rat buddies, but when he wakes up,
they’re gone. Confused, Joe walks back to the main room,
and sees his daily meal tray gets slid inside. However, this meal is slightly different.
He wails in agony at the sight of his rat friend and its babies dead served on the plate.
A few more days pass by, and we see Joe attempt to kill himself but fails, as the ominous white fog
seeps inside the room again, and the next time he wakes up, he’s all patched up.
Years go by; Joe relies on the television in the room to catch up on the outside world,
including news about his daughter, Mia. He smiles in relief when he learns that Mia has been adopted
by two loving parents, and seems to be thriving with the cello. This provides Joe with newfound
hope. Therefore he begins to write letters to his daughter, hoping that once he gets out, his
daughter will get to read them. Not only that, he stops drinking alcohol and begins working out, and
eventually gets very fit. He also begins marking the years that go by, by tattooing himself with a
needle and the room heater. After spending almost two decades stuck in the room, Joe comes up with
an escape plan. Day by day, he begins scraping the cement on the edges of the bathroom wall’s bricks,
and takes off the bricks one by one until on the twentieth year, he manages to create a hole
that he can fit through.
He crawls through it and follows a dark tunnel,
until he reaches the end, and kicks his way through.
Joe then returns to the room to retrieve the
letters he wrote to his daughter, right when the television conveniently starts playing
an interview with his daughter, who is now an adult. In the interview, Mia says that if her
father Joe is still alive, she’s willing to try to forgive Joe even though he killed her mother.
Distracted by the television, white fog floods the room again, and Joe gets knocked unconscious once
more. We then move to the next scene where Joe wakes up inside a box in the middle of a field.
He has his letters with him, along with a wad of cash, and a smartphone that shows a countdown.
Right when he exits the box, he sees a woman with the exact yellow umbrella he saw the night
he got kidnapped. He goes after the woman, but gets interrupted by a group of football
players who thinks he is harassing the woman. Now prepared with his years of training in captivity,
Joe easily beats up the football players before resuming on his way.
He then sees the yellow umbrella again among a crowd queueing for a mobile medical clinic,
but he finds that this time, it is a man holding the umbrella. Since Joe’s action caused a scene,
this prompts a nurse named Marie to walk up to him, and softly ask him if he’s okay and
hands him her card. Joe brushes her off and stomps away to visit his old friend,
Chucky. After 20 years of disappearance, he tells Chucky everything that happened to him, right when
all of the sudden his phone rings. As he picks up, we learn that the caller is none other than the
man who held him captive for the last 20 years. The man challenges Joe to find his daughter, Mia.
After the call ends, Joe then asks Chucky to help him track down whoever did this to him,
which is no easy task because Joe has quite a long list of people he wronged in the past.
Joe pulls an all-nighter to research anything and everything that he could find, until Chucky finds
him lying unconscious on the floor later, and reaches for Marie’s card inside Joe’s pocket.
On the next scene, we see Marie tending to the unconscious Joe,
until she stumbles upon Joe’s letters, and ends up reading quite a few of them out of curiosity.
Feeling violated, Joe yanks the letters away from her, and begins acting aggressive. Marie calms him
down by telling him that she believes his story, and is willing to help him. Now accompanied by
Marie, Joe continues his investigation to find the culprit behind his kidnapping and imprisonment.
They go to visit one of Joe’s old enemies, but finds that he is now senile, and basically a
vegetable. Later on, he comes up with another idea: he decides to try eating the dumplings
served at every single Chinese restaurant with the word ‘dragon’ on its name, because it’s the
only thing he’s been fed with for the last 20 years. At some point during the search, Marie
excuses herself because she has to go to work. Joe then resumes his search alone, until he’s finally
convinced he’s found the right place. He pays attention to a big takeaway order across the room,
and decides to follow the sketchy-looking man who comes to pick up the order.
When Joe manages to sneak into the building with the man, he kills the sketchy man,
and pretends to be him to be let inside the place. Once he is inside, he proceeds to kill
the receptionist. Here we learn that Joe wasn’t the only one held captive. In fact, there are
hundreds of other people being held inside these hotel-looking rooms. Joe then apprehends a man
named Chaney for questioning, and tortures Chaney by cutting open flesh wounds all over his neck.
The bad guy is no longer spared as Joe pours salt on it, until Chaney confesses that he doesn’t know
who his employer is. Instead, Chaney tells him to reach for an audio recording and listen to it.
In the recording, Chaney’s employer simply tells him to lock up Joe for 20 years,
without even stating the reason why. As this is going on, a goon finds the receptionist dead,
and summons the rest of his friends.
They then ambush Joe, and forces him to fight them.
It's at this point that Joe shows what he got from being held in the strange room.
In the end, Joe wins the fight, but walks away with a stab wound to the back.
He then collapses right outside the building, and a strange man suddenly picks him up, and drops him
off in front of Chucky’s bar for some reason. Mary and a fellow nurse ends up tending to Joe’s wound,
and later, Joe overhears Mary and her friend arguing. The friend thinks that Mary should stop
trying to help Joe because Joe seems dangerous, but Marie who is selfless and too kind for her own
good is still adamant on helping Joe. Afterwards, Joe spends some time in Chucky’s bar, wherein he
finally comes across the very man he sought to find. The man casually talks to Joe, and
the enraged Joe naturally moves to attacked him, but he gets bested by the man’s trusty bodyguard.
The man proceeds to give Joe two challenges which he must complete within the next
forty-eight hours.
One, Joe must find out the man’s identity, and Two,
Joe must find out the reason why the man kidnapped and imprisoned him for twenty years. If Joe
manages to find out the answers within two days, the man promises Joe 20 million dollars worth of
diamonds, and to make things more odd, the man promises to kill himself in front of Joe. Before
leaving, he casually informs Joe that Chaney and his men are seeking revenge by attacking Marie.
Of course this prompts Joe to rush to Marie’s aid, and there Joe is captured by Chaney's men.
Chaney then receives a call from the kidnapper who offers Chaney a vast amount of money in
return for Joe's release. Here we can see that the two clearly care deeply about each other.
After the bad guys left, Joe gets another call from the man,
and he notes that the same sound always plays in the background of each call. Marie then pulls out
her phone, and uses Shazam to find the song, when the two discover that the song is the anthem of
a prep school called Evergreen Academy, which is a school Joe went to when he was younger.
The two try looking up the school on the internet but the website is inaccessible,
because the school is now closed. Luckily, they manage to find Joe’s old headmistress,
so the two decide to pay her a visit. Marie pretends to be an investigator who’s trying
to prove Joe’s innocence in the murder case, while Joe sneaks inside the house to steal a yearbook.
Here we learn that young Joe had a lot of enemies because he was a bully.
Joe suddenly focuses on one picture of a guy named Adrian Pryce and something click in his mind.
After the visit, the two decide to take a rest, and clean themselves up. The tension
between them is through the roof by now, and they end up passionately making love to
each other. Unbeknownst to them, the mysterious man has installed a secret camera in the room.
Back at the bar, Chucky who also went to Evergreen with Joe is doing his own research,
right when he discovers something on the internet that prompts him to call Joe right away,
but Joe clearly has better things to do.
Unbeknownst to Chucky, the call is monitored by the mysterious man.
The man who is indeed Adrian Pryce, gets offended because Chucky referred to his sister as ‘the whore’,
right before the man decides to pay Chucky a visit.
At night, Joe and Marie who are still unaware of what is going on, sneak into the school,
and decide to study old school records. After digging through the records, Joe finds the record
of Adrian's sister, Amanda. As Joe takes a trip back down the memory lane, he recalls that he
used to bully her, and realizes that the man who imprisoned him was none other than Adrian Price,
his old classmate. Joe is sure of this because when he was younger, he saw Adrian’s sister having
sex with a man inside the school’s greenhouse. Back to present time, Joe and Marie do some more
research and find out that the pryce family moved after that. Later, the father eliminated his wife,
his daughter, Amanda, and then ended his life leaving behind a severely wounded Adrian.
At the end of their search, Joe and Marie comes across a package sent by the mysterious
man whose name we now know is Adrian Pryce, and finds Chucky’s severed tongue inside.
Not only that, Adrian informs Joe a rendezvous point, and tells Joe that he has Joe’s daughter
with him. Overtaken by anger and eager to see his daughter, Joe moves to leave the premises. Marie
tries to keep him from going because she’s worried about his safety, but Joe is adamant. Later on,
he comes face to face with Adrian, and this time, he manages to kill Adrian’s trusty bodyguard.
Right after, Joe manages to answer the first question about who he is.
We then learn that apparently, Joe’s actions in the past led to an even worse outcome than simply
ruin Amanda Price, Adrian's sister's self esteem. As it turns out, being the immature teen Joe was,
he decided to tell everyone about what he saw in the greenhouse. As a result,
Adrian’s father was infuriated, as he saw this as a disgrace to their family’s name. Covered
in shame, one day the father simply snapped and decided to kill every single person in the family
before killing himself. Adrian only managed to survive because the bullet missed his heart.
And to add an even darker twist, the father felt immense shame because not only was Adrian’s sister
having sex with an older man in the greenhouse, she was having sex with her own father. Because
Joe managed to figure it all out, Adrian presented him with the 20 million dollars worth of diamonds,
as promised. Not only that, he proceeds to lead Joe to another room to see his daughter. Joe then
gets taken to a room that looks like a TV studio, and here Adrian reveals to him that the TV show
Joe’s been watching that updated him about his daughter over the years was all made up. All this
time, Adrian had hired an actress to pose as Mia. Joe is enraged by this and begins to question
where the real Mia is. To this, Adrian simply answers that after killing Joe’s wife; Adrian went
through great effort to change Mia’s identity, and even went as far as changing her name to Marie.
Well, you heard that right. Marie the nurse is Joe’s real daughter.
All this time, Adrian had concocted a very elaborate plan to not only imprison Joe,
but upon releasing him, Adrian also had planned to get Joe to meet his daughter.
Adrian managed make them to spend time together and finally make love to each other, so Joe would finally
understand the pain that Adrian’s family and especially his sister went through.
Joe who is now beyond disgusted and disappointed in himself,
no longer has the desire to kill Adrian.
Adrian Pryce stays true to his word. With his entire family dead and his lust for
vengeance satisfied, he kills himself in front of Joe, just like he promised.
The movie ends with Joe leaving a goodbye note to Marie along with the diamonds.
In the note, he tells her that he cannot see her anymore and
that he’s done something unforgivable that he needs to punish himself for it.
In the last scene, we see Chaney the rooms manager receives the diamonds,
and Joe willingly returns to the same room, where he was held captive for the past 20 years.