Fermat’s Room

“Do you know what prime numbers are?” a voice asks during Fermat’s Room’s opening moments. “If not, you can just leave now.” Luckily, you don’t need to know much about maths to understand this claustrophobic thriller. Its subject matter is abstract equations, but what you’ll be left with as the credits roll is clammy palms and an adrenaline comedown, rather than a school lesson buzzing in your head.

The voice belongs to Alejo Sauras, playing a floppy haired, blue-eyed cutie, who just happens to be one of the world’s leading mathematicians. He’s working on a proof of Goldbach’s Conjecture, the theory that every even number is the sum of two primes. But then his laptop gets destroyed, a mysterious invitation to a meeting of mathematical minds arrives at his door, and before you can say Cube, he’s stuck in a room that’s shrinking by the second with three other eggheads. To slow the mechanism threatening to crush them, the team must solve a series of puzzles, but each is hiding secrets that may explain what got them into this mess in the first place.

First-time writer/director team Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopeña know how to hike up the suspense, and their script throws out enough red herrings that smart-arses who like to claim they saw it all coming should be kept quiet. The tension steadily grows as the room gets cosier; shots of sliding walls, splintering furniture and exploding lightbulbs are interleaved with a geometrically pleasing bird’s eye view of the dwindling space.

As a murder mystery, though, Fermat’s Room is unsatisfying. There are only five characters in the film, but we don’t get to know any of them well enough to make us emotionally invested in the various plot twists – things just happen. The villain, when he’s revealed, is neither creepy nor compelling. There is a series of improbable coincidences and a clunky deus ex machina ending, while the film takes itself too seriously to let the question of why this extravagant James Bond death-trap was devised go without a proper answer.

It would have been a neat trick if the denouement of Fermat’s Room was the logical consequence of facts given to us earlier in the film, mirroring the sort of mathematical formula that its characters are struggling towards. But perhaps that’s too pedantic a gripe about what remains a confidently shot, fast-paced first feature.

Jess Holland

Anticipation:

Academics in peril? Not another Da Vinci Code?!

Enjoyment:

Racing heart? Check. Twists and turns? Check. This thriller thrills.

In Retrospect:

Not much to mull over when the credits roll.