The Letter Room is a 2020 short film (32 minutes) directed by Elvira Lind, starring Oscar Isaac and Alia Shawkat.
Richard (Isaac) is a guard at a prison in some nameless place. He's a gentle sort who treats the inmates in the prison with dignity and seeks to build trust and rapport with them. He has applied for a promotion and is delighted when the warden tells him he's getting a job in the Communications department. Richard has big ideas about rehabilitating violent offenders, which are punctured immediately when the warden tells him what "Communications" is: monitoring prisoners' incoming and outgoing mail.
Richard's new job as the prison mailman has him interacting with two Death Row inmates in particular. One, Jackson, hasn't gotten a message from his daughter in two years and begs Richard to double-check, as he suspects the previous Communications officer withheld mail. A second, Cris, is facing execution soon. He is receiving passionate, and sometimes erotic, letters from a woman named Rosita (Shawkat). Richard is made mildly uncomfortable by the sex letters but he is alarmed when Rosita writes that she will kill herself when Cris is executed.
Tropes:
- Establishing Character Moment: Richard's friendly chuckling and easy manner as he takes Jackson to the exercise yard shows that he is a good guy and not a Captain Hadley-style evil prison guard.
- Forged Message: The film ends with Richard forging a letter from Jackson's daughter. Jackson obviously isn't fooled for a minute—he chuckles and says "That motherfucker!"—but he's also obviously touched.
- Jump Cut: There's a jump cut in the opening scene from Richard eating a fast food burger in his car, to Richard drinking his drink, seemingly to mark the whole lunch break as mundane.
- The Place: The letter room of a prison, where Richard monitors and sends along inmate correspondence.
- Porn Stache: Richard's bushy soup-strainer of a mustache marks him immediately as a certain type of manly, working-class man.
- Prison: A grim and sad place but one that still allows for human connection.
- The Reveal: Worried about Rosita's vow to kill herself, Richard goes to her house. She's married and apparently about eight months pregnant.
- Rewatch Bonus: Why does Rosita say she won't attend the execution? Because she's heavily pregnant, that's why.
- TV Telephone Etiquette: Richard mutters in annoyance after the warden hangs up on him without saying goodbye.
- Voiceover Letter: Richard's reading of Rosita's letter transitions into a voiceover from Rosita. This sets up a look of mild embarrassment on Richard's face as the voiceover letter from Rosita grows increasingly erotic.
- Where the Hell Is Springfield?: The movie takes care to not name the state where the prison and its death house are located. The guards' uniforms only say "CORRECTIONS".
