LA HABITATION DE FERMAT (FERMAT’S ROOM)

Spain, 2007, 88 minutes, Colour.
Lluis Homar, Federico Luppi, Santi Millan, Elena Ballesteros, Alejo Sauras.
Directed by Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopena.

Mathematics has been making something of a comeback on the screens. There has been the popular series, Numbers, on television. Alex Iglesias made the thriller, The Oxford Murders, with philosophical and mathematical theory being discussion. Fermat's Room is another mathematical thriller.

After some discussion about prime numbers and various conjectures, we are introduced to four characters who eventually win a competition in solving an enigma and are invited to a special meeting of mathematical minds. Then it turns into an Agatha Christie-like situation, And Then There Were None. They find that they are trapped in a slowly diminishing room, pushed inwards by four pressure engines. They are given puzzles to solve – and, if they fail, the walls push in. Can they solve this puzzle? Who will survive? But... who is masterminding this situation and what are the motives?

AS the walls press in, so do the pressures on conscience. We find that the four have secrets that explain why they are trapped in this puzzle.

The young screenwriters also introduce some twists, especially concerning the identity of Fermat – which means that the audience makes assumptions that lead them away from the solution.

A canny thriller.

1.A film of enigmas and puzzles? Mathematics and science? Theory and application of mathematical theory?

2.The life situation, the mathematical puzzle, the threats, facing the threats, solving the puzzle? In the context of a thriller?

3.The Spanish setting: the university, the girls getting the young man’s autograph, the apartment and its destruction, the chess game, the office and the engineer? The setting for the characters? The meeting place at the river, the boat, the car and its lights, the drive, the warehouse? The musical score?

4.Fermat’s room, the claustrophobic sense? The interiors, the furniture and décor, the crowding? Angles, the walls, movement? The contrast with the outside scenes: Fermat’s car, the service station and the chat, the hospital, his carefree manner? The police, the seatbelt – and the sense of menace? The repercussions? For the group?

5.Mathematics and puzzles, the history of mathematics, theorems, the madness of the mathematicians, suicides? The codenames, their life-spans?

6.The puzzles in the room, the mobile phone, the time limit for solutions, anxieties, panic, the walls moving in?

7.The group: the separate introductions, their arrival, communicating, signs of puzzle? The professor knowing the student? The young man and woman kissing? The codes? The time, the blinking lights, the boat and the name Pythagoras, rowing across the river, the car, driving to the house? Fermat, his arriving, the meal – and the flashbacks to the meal, the phone call?

8.The variety of secrets, the man and his hit-run of Fermat’s daughter, his confession? Fermat and the plan? His being made the scapegoat?

9.The young woman, her breaking the puzzles, the separation from her boyfriend, the phone call, the sexual encounters, her return, giving the information to the professor?

10.The student, being feted as a celebrity, autographs, his talk about his solving the conjecture, his lie? The fake destruction of his room?

11.Their working out that the professor was the controller, his phone, absence from the room?

12.His motivation, the solution for the conjecture, whether he intended to die or not, to save himself?

13.The physical pressure of the walls, the machines, confronting the opposing machines with the desks? Working out an escape? Breaking the wall, the lift? Leaving the professor? Taking his manuscript?

14.The boat, the ethical issue for the student, the man throwing the documents away – and saying the world was still as it was rather than the young man’s claim of how important the solution was to the world?

15.The film as an intellectual puzzle, intuitions and ingenuity, maths and the cerebral aspects, the final ethical and emotional issues?