Room 999 Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		5.0
Video		5.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		5.0

Room 999 Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 28, 2025

Note: This film is available on Blu-ray as part of the Room 666 / Room 999 double feature from Criterion.

It's maybe just slightly hilarious that the only hotel accomodation Wim Wenders could find during the 1982 Cannes Film Festival for a little project he had in mind had a rather, well, memorable room number, but in this case the only "horror" element was Wenders' assertion that cinema might be a dying art, a thesis he then asked a variety of remarkable filmmakers to react to, first person and alone in that very room, with a 16mm camera and tape recorder documenting their responses. The result is absolutely riveting, despite its presentational constraints. Forty years after Wenders' fascinating mini documentary was released, Lubna Playoust returned to the idea, if not the same hotel room, and asked a whole coterie of "new" filmmakers to react to Wenders' original "storm warning". Once again, the results are often provocative.

The filmmakers interviewed in Room 999 are:

• Wim Wenders
• Audrey Diwan
• David Cronenberg
• Joachim Trier
• Shannon Murphy
• James Gray
• Arnaud Desplechin
• Lynne Ramsay
• Asghar Farhadi
• Nadav Lapid
• Claire Denis
• Davy Chou
• Baz Luhrmann
• Alice Winocour
• Ayo Akingrade
• Olivier Assayas
• Paolo Sorrentino
• Agnes Jaoui
• Kirill Serebrennikov
• Cristian Mungiu
• Kleber Mendonca Filho
• Albert Serra
• Monia Chokri
• Ninja Thyberg
• Pietro Marcello
• Rebecca Zlotowski
• Ali Cherri
• Ruben Ostlund
• Clement Cogitore
• Alice Rohrwacher
• Nicolas Lunginotti

This is another fascinating array of reactions, and if the zeitgeist (and even the metaphors, as in a Lebanese Cedar tree by the Paris airport which shows up in both films) has changed, there's still a rather wide gamut of responses. Rather interestingly Wenders himself seems to be conflating "cinema" with celluloid, lamenting the rise of digital production techniques, which to me anyway seems to be more an argument about technology than Art. Probably unsurprisingly, there is a more general consensus that nothing much is really being threatened, at least as long as there are "fearless" (or at least foolhardy) folks willing to continue to create films.

Room 999 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Room 999 is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Criterion with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.47:1. There's no technical information about this particular transfer imparted in either the insert leaflet or the back cover of this release. This is a handsome digital capture that, much as with the original film, doesn't really have much to work with in terms of any "wow factor", but which offers a nicely clear and well detailed image throughout. Detail levels are generally excellent, but again, this is a film made up almost entirely of a static midrange framing, and so fine detail levels only really pop when people get up and move closer to the camera.

Room 999 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Room 999 kind of comically swings the pendulum in the opposite direction from Room 666's Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono track, with a probably needless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track. You can get little wafts of surround activity occasionally in some of the interview segments, but frankly a mono track, let alone a stereo one, would have sufficed perfectly well. All spoken material is delivered cleanly and clearly. Our language specs only allow for one principal language, but this is another multilingual affair with optional English subtitles.

Room 999 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This is obviously a double feature of sorts, with the disc offering the following supplements:

• Meet the Filmmakers (HD; 14:35) is an appealing interview with Lubna Playoust and offers a bit more context on her effort.


• Trailer (HD; 00:43) is for Room 999.

The insert leaflet contains an essay by Michael Joshua Rowin.

Room 999 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Room 999 manages to "compete" (if that's the right word) surprisingly well with Wenders' original film, and it's notable how many women are on hand this time around. Technical merits are solid, and the supplemental interview enjoyable. Highly recommended.