Review

It's a competent debut from a very young director. If we're grading on a curve, it's quite good. Things are structurally sound. If I'm being more critical and judging it purely on merits, I do have some problems. But it's hard to separate Backrooms from the wider context. Its youtube pedigree. Such an odd full circle moment of seeing something on the big screen (in my living room), that descends from some nonsense 4chan post. We're in a frightening new land. I fully expect the executives to descend from their perches and go fishing for gold in the ocean full of internet shit. I suspect the majority of attempts will go about as poorly as anyone would expect. But such is the way of the executive.

I would say that Backrooms is about what I expected going in. I'm not sure how else a movie based on the silly liminal space concept could go. But as I said, I do have problems. The first half of this film is really quite good. I love the initial exploration. I love when we involve the other furniture store employees. It's after that, when we start involving the therapist that things start to go a little South for me. All the sections of the film where we're doing the handheld camera found footage are the clear standouts. Which I suppose speaks well of Parsons, given they're the direct analogue to his youtube series. It is quite weird, to be sure. Had a bit of an out-of-body experience. I have, for the record, seen the series. I do not make a habit of consuming backrooms content. But I had heard it come recommended and I had an hour or two to burn at one point. It's well-done. I'd be deeply curious to see the perspective of someone watching this film who had no familiarity with the origins of the backrooms or Parsons' series in particular. It seems so internet-coded that seeing it in a film felt a little sacrosanct, even if I largely enjoyed it.

If I could give one well-meaning bit of constructive criticism, it would be that the film was really the time to kill our darlings. I get that in the youtube series, the men in yellow, our mysterious government organization is the framing device. They're who we're following the whole time. And so I get the desire to involve them here. I think that's a total mistake. We do not have the time to effectively set up any backstory with them. So all of the time we spend seeing them, cutting to them, speaking with them, seemed completely wasted to me. I would have been perfectly fine seeing evidence of other humans exploring the backrooms. The wires going all over, the backpack, the cameras. But I would not have had any scenes with the actual organization. It's just more interesting seeing humans exploring this strange eldritch place without any knowledge of its nature. We don't need any experts (or pseudo-experts as it were). Additionally would raise the interesting possibility of the signs of civilization we're seeing are real or just yet more conjured traps by this place. It's not that any of these bits lead to any pacing problems. I would actually say that one thing the film does surprisingly well for it's just under 2 hour runtime is keep up a good pace. It flies by. Rather, I think they're just wasted time. Any minutes we're wasting seeing or talking to the yellow men should have instead been spent exploring or running.

Setting those bits aside, I would additionally say that there's other problems from that halfway point on. First, I think Mary the therapist's entrance into the backrooms is a bit annoying. It's like really well done in the sound department. It should be anxiety-inducing. But it's not because at that point we've seen multiple characters go in. We've seen the initial shock, the entrance area through the door. So seeing yet another person gawk and exclaim at the environs is a bit of a waste. We know, move on. I personally would have had her pop out in some totally different area, in order to show that we're well out of our depth. To show that things can change (and that all that mapping was pointless). There is one thing that super annoyed me here. What the fuck was that flashback? When Mary looks at the map and she remembers the other map that Clark made. The thing that happened like...15 minutes prior in the movie? That genuinely peeved me. It felt so made for the person viewing the movie from above the edge of their phone screen. Disrespectful. I don't care that people are less media literate than ever. I don't care that the micro-plastics are our generation's leaded gasoline. Stop fucking allowing stupid people to rule our lives. Stop making movies and TV for them and when they complain that they don't understand what's happening, goddamn mock them! They're stupid and deserve it! Ughh.

The other thing I don't like from this point on in the film is that we totally skip over Jack Torrence's descent into madness. We see Clark when he's exploring with his employees. By the next time we see him, when we switch to therapist as our POV and she catches up, he's gone off the deep end. Just feels like there was some interesting things happening there that maybe you would represent in a film? I do like the scene where she reams him out and tears him a new one. This would be a good example of subverting expectations. You expect we'll get the typical talking the guy down from the ledge, but no. We get a "You're fucking crazy, all I want to do is get the hell out of here and away from you." Felt satisfying. But there's just some odd choices where we skip over things that I'd actually quite like to see. More of Clark's initial explorations and his descent. Less with the A-sync men.

There's definitely a good film here. I applaud the courage to have everything as brightly lit as it should be in a backrooms film. I know that there were discussions. The old executive men coming in with their filth and shit that they smear on everything and questioning why things aren't dark. Because if it's horror, it has to be dark. The production was pretty uniformly excellent. Great sets. Both in and out of the backrooms, by the by. I like the subtle little details we do in the real world to make it look a little bit weird. Strange camera angles, riffs on liminal visuals. Good stuff. The mistakes generally feel to me like rookie stuff. Stuff that becomes obvious once you have more film knowledge under your belt. Focusing too much on things that don't really matter. Not honing in on something that would have been interesting to see. Etc. There was nothing here that was like a big red flag of "Oh, I don't know about you." I would be interested in seeing what the director does in the future.