Fermat’s Room (La habitación de Fermat)
“Do you know what prime numbers are? Because
if you don't, you should just leave now.” This represents the first line from
“Fermat’s Room”, a 2007 Spanish thriller film directed by Rodrigo Sopeña and
Luis Piedrahita and I can honestly say that it successfully achieves its
twofold aim: not only does the sentence catch the viewer’s attention since the
first seconds, but it also warns that this movie looks like nothing one has
seen before.
There is no denying the
fact that “Fermat’s Room” is the proof that art and science are more alike than
different. These two elements coexist harmoniously in the movie, whose action
takes place mainly in a single room. The protagonists of the film, four
brilliant mathematicians are invited by a man called “Fermat” to an isolated
house, giving as a pretext a great enigma which must be solved by them.
However, the room in which Galois, Hilbert, Pascal and Oliva are locked turns
out to be a trap, since the only apparent way to escape from the slowly closing
walls of the shrinking room is to rapidly solve different puzzles given by the
guest.
One of the film’s plus points is
the way in which its intricate plot develops. During the ninety minutes runtime,
one will witness many plot twists which, together with the stunning mathematics
elements, create an adrenaline-filled movie. Suspense is one of the main
characters of this thriller and, despite the fact that the film refers to a
vast array of mathematical problems, whose solutions presented by the
characters may be somehow difficult to keep up with, I feel sure that any
person who is fond of suspenseful, mysterious scenes will not be capable of
taking his or her eyes off the screen.
“Fermat’s Room” is all about enigmas, mystery and suspense, while details like Goldbach’s conjecture and Blaise Pascal’s age when he died indeed
represent the icing on the cake. If you are an avid fan of complex storylines
and are eager to discover some of the most fiendish mathematical problems one
can imagine, you will not regret watching this second-to-none movie!
