IFC Films and MPI Home Video have announced the DVD release of Fermat's Room, written and directed by Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopeña.
La Habitación De Fermat, or Fermat's Room, was originally released in Spain on November 16, 2007. It grossed approximately $284,000 in its opening weekend. The movie was released in the United States in international film festivals in early 2009, before going directly to DVD. Blockbuster Inc. originally had acquired a temporary exclusive license for its rental release in the United States.
Fermat's Room stars veteran international star Federico Luppi (Guillermo del Toro's Cronos and Pan's Labyrinth) as the diabolical Fermat and, as the trapped mathematicians, Lluis Homar (Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education), Elena Ballesteros, Alejo Sauras and Santi Millan.
This movie intrigued me — despite the fact that it was in Spanish with English subtitles (I think many can attest that generally watching a foreign movie with subtitles can be a bit taxing). As it turned out, that was pretty much a non-issue. I actually watched Fermat's Room a couple of times just to make sure I didn't miss all the nuances by having to read the subtitles. Nope, got the whole thing the first time.
Fermat's Room is an intricately conceived and brilliantly devious thriller. The premise: four genius mathematicians who apparently don't know each other are given pseudonyms/code names, and invited to the remote home of a mysterious man known only as Fermat.
But it turns out that Fermat's room is the incredible shrinking room where staying alive is much more challenging than the mathematical enigmas presented — each of which must be answered within 60 seconds to keep the room from shrinking further under the pressure of four powerful hydraulic presses akin to those used to make cubes out of automobiles in junk yards.
The opening scene is set with a young, innovative but cocky mathematician showing off... errr, I mean, teaching a couple of cute young lady students some interesting facts about prime numbers. This same brilliant young man is soon to be demonstrating that he has resolved the Goldbach Conjecture. But then, to his dismay, he finds out that his room has been trashed, his computer destroyed, and his documentation and papers gone. Who would do such a thing?
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