Geek On Film

Backrooms

• Robbie Holmes • Episode 111

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0:00 | 14:09
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Welcome in, folks. Just wanted to thank you for uh watching this video, but also for all the engagement that I've been having. I mentioned earlier in a previous couple of videos that there are now video versions of this podcast. So you can watch it on YouTube or you can watch it over on Spotify. And also I'm doing uh so these are oneers or longer episodes. And then on TikTok and Instagram and over on YouTube in shorts, I'm doing what I'm calling instant reactions, which is a one-minute video where I talk about my reaction to a movie that I just saw. It's mostly movies that are current and in the zeitgeist, but um who knows? I do all kinds of wacky stuff. Uh, thank you so much for all your engagement over the last couple of weeks. Uh, thank you for following and rating and reviewing and all the commenting. Um, it really does make this more fun and also uh makes it more worth my time. Um, I'd love to do more of this. This is something I really am passionate about, and I care a lot about film and the film ecosystem. Uh, you should ask my wife. Uh, she is tired of hearing about backworms. Uh, so let's transition into that. Our friends over at IMDB have the summary of this movie as after a therapist's patient disappears into a dimension beyond reality, she must venture into the unknown to save him. It's written by Kane Parsons and Will Sodic, and it is directed by Kane Parsons. My review over on Letterboxd is I'm still trying to parse what it is about this that works so well for me. But I was 100% bought in from the moment I walked in. The opening sequence of uh on a VHS tape is so disconcerting and off-putting that it really just set up for the rest of the movie for me. The four stars for me is really about the experience on top of the movie that was actually made. I definitely had my heart rate elevate while I was watching this and couldn't take my eyes off the screen. Someone has already made the joke that feels like a premise of an old school joke. A therapist and an architect walk into a mind palace. I think that's really it. It's a rather simple, straightforward, and completely opaque movie. I really was impressed. I gave it four stars and a heart. I am so impressed with what Kane Parsons has done in this movie. Um, I I'm so old that I am not a denizen of the ecosystem where this all spawned. I have not been on 4chan. I have uh not gone on the deep dives that are going on that Kane Pixels created of sort of taking this is luminous, this single image uh that started it all off uh and created an entire ecosystem and world around it. Um, but I'm super impressed. Uh the story itself is powerful and it really just feels like uh you can apply so much to it that could be the intention. It seems like what really good art is. Um, some people are gonna be frustrated by the story, some people are gonna be frustrated by the lack of you know, uh, explanation or the the too much explanation you can get into. Um, I think it's really interesting. This is gonna be a Rorschach test, but uh things that we should know is it's Monday morning, and uh this movie made a lot of money. Um it is kind of crazy to think. Uh this movie made $18 million yesterday, and it's weekend haul, uh, so from Thursday through yesterday is $81.5 million. That makes it the largest opening ever for A24. Uh, it's got all kinds of other accolades. Uh, that is astounding. The fact that this movie that came out of a single image that was created by someone anonymously and posted online and then sprung out of that image, this sort of ecosystem of storytelling, which feels an awful lot like a modern fable that is coming to life. Like we talk about, you know, folk horror and things like that. This feels like not folk horror, but like modern existentialist dread horror. Um, when you go into this movie, you spend so much time in these liminal spaces where things just seem slightly off or that they seem to go on in at infinitum. And these are not normal feelings. Uh, something just doesn't feel right about this space and about the movie that the characters are are habitating. Um, so let's talk a little bit about the characters, even though I think they're not actually the point of what I'm excited about. Uh, you've got uh Chiwe Ajafor is playing Clark, who is uh divorced owner of a furniture store. This movie is set in the 1990s. Uh, he has uh a store that is not obviously doing great. Uh, and uh he is very much the sort of uh prototypical angry divorcee who lives in a world of excess or the world that we deemed we needed. Um, you know, everything here is like fabricated. Um, he takes on this persona of a pirate and is doing this entire intro commercial that feels like he's degrading himself a little bit. And in the end, he sits on a throne, you know, makes some other punny joke, and then the throne cracks and breaks because it's crappy particle board. And that is sort of like the whole movie in a nutshell, it feels like the story it's trying to tell us is that none of this stuff matters. When eventually you find him and he finds his way into this liminal space, he uh there's a problem with this. The power to his uh to his store is too high. Electrician comes and takes a look at it. They end up going to the circuit breaker, they see a couple of weird circuit breakers that are not aligned with the rest of them. And then uh the next night he's sleeping there in the store and he's a little drunk, and he goes to the basement because the lights flicker on and off upstairs, and then they flicker on in the basement, and he walks past a wall that seemingly has like a thin light line at a certain angle. And he walks directly through the wall in this concept of clipping or no clipping on a wall, which is very, very old school video game. Uh, if you've ever played a video game, um if there's a failure in the game's logic, you can end up no clipping across zones. But a lot of times those were put in place so that people could QA the games and they could go from place to place without having to play the whole game. Um, so it was a manufactured defect in the game. And it feels like that is also playing a little bit of a part in this world. Um Clark spends a bunch of time in there. He also uh goes back to his therapist after finding this liminal space. Uh, and his therapist is Mary, played by Renata Ricev. And uh she seems to also be a person who is affected by you know sadness and doom. Um, she grew up, there's some flashbacks to her life, and she her mother is agoraphobic and and is a kind of a hoarder and won't let her daughter leave the house. And uh and Renata Ricev is a therapist who is trying to fix people and has, you know, books on tape about her methodology, and it doesn't seem to be successful. And all that plays into Clark doesn't show up for uh a couple of his, I think a couple of his therapy sessions. She ends up going to the store, she ends up going into the liminal space. She finds that he has put a blue piece of tape, like you know, carpenter's tape or painter's tape, around where the doorway is, and she walks through. And she eventually ends up in the space and and all other chaos ensues. The rest of the story I will not uh spoil for you, even though I don't think it really matters that much. The reality here is you spend an awful lot of time in this space, and you have this sense of dread that is not just the liminal spaces, but it's how it's shot. There's a first-person-esque shooter feeling, like from a video game. Um, sometimes it's because there's a video camera, other times it's because that is the choice that the director has chosen for us to view. But one of the nice things about that is the whole world is populated by like these fluorescent lights that hum all the time. And most of the walls are this like yellow wallpaper that seems both antiquated and of the time, but also not right. Creates all these weird patterns, which anything out of the ordinary in the liminal space, if if some wall is slightly off or angled, you immediately recognize it because of this wallpaper. And uh, and then you hear the breathing of the of the character that we're in the focus of. And it's pretty impressive how just this quiet, like, world uh of these white noises and the noises introduced by the characters being there is creepy. And then there's also this aspect of hearing footsteps and noises in that space where you can't see who it is that's making it, and that's even double creepy. Um, so I in my review, I think I talked about the fact that my heart rate definitely elevated. Um, I think it's not like a traditional horror movie. I think it is a horror, it's more a psychological terror creation vehicle that has a story bolted onto it. I think it's we are feeling this sense of dread from the moment you walk into the backrooms. And the movie opens with a video where somebody seems to be maybe a scientist who's gotten separated from their group of people, and something happens to that scientist. But there's some really great, like immediate jump scares that happen at that time period, which really set you off and make you uncomfortable. So as soon as Clark finds the space, you're ready for the badness. And then once Mary enters the space, we're like double madness, double sadness, all kinds of crazy is about to happen. Um, yeah, I absolutely was astounded by this movie. Uh, I walked out of it like sort of humming and buzzing. I was so excited to talk about it. And I saw it without my wife, and then I saw her, and I was like, blah. I like excitedly told her everything I could about the movie. Uh, I really liked it. I was really impressed with what uh he was able to pull off. And I also think this is sort of an interesting take on what is a current approach to movies. You know, I feel a little bit like this, and I'm about to also record a podcast about obsession and then other podcasts, other movies I've seen that I really loved, like Eva Victor Sari Baby, and Long Legs, or Pearl, or X, you know, the the there's a really amazing contingent of, or like um uh talk to me, right? I didn't look I didn't see the second movie, but there's a world full of creators that are coming up from the YouTube ecosystem that have gotten a chance to like cut their teeth and make something and distribute it, whether or not it got like a full theater distribution, they have been working on their ideas and putting them out in public and getting feedback. And in the case of backrooms, it's created an entire world full of people who are coming together to create this modern folklore. And it's sort of like open source software development, but it is open source story development. There's some basic rules of what the backrooms is, and then it goes from there. You can figure it out and you can augment it and you can make changes to it as long as you document why. And uh it has that feeling to me of what an open source community around open source software feels like. Um, fascinating, absolutely fascinating. Uh, I don't know if I would say this is a shift in the like cinema landscape, but it does feel a little bit like there's a a group of auteurs who are starting to emerge that might be the YouTube generation. Um, we talked about like, you know, uh new American cinema, like the independent scene, right? And this might be the sort of YouTube generation of creators. It's really impressive, it's really powerful, and I hope that every single studio uh that makes movies does not take the wrong initiative out of this, which is anything that is made on YouTube can become a $100 million film. But I do hope that more people will take seriously uh these sort of self-taught filmmakers and allow them more opportunities. And I think it's really unbelievable that this person created this movie when they were 18 years old, signed a contract, 19 they shot it, and they're 20 years old, and the movie's out. It's made the most money any A24 movie has ever made in its opening weekend. And it's probably going to be its most successful movie of all time. All right, let's stop there. Uh, you should see this movie. You should see it in a theater, you should see it with a lot of people, you should definitely feel what it's like to be in this space. Um, yes, you can watch it on YouTube, but I think the movie version of it to me is a little bit larger and a little bit more like sort of uh it creates a more claustrophobic feeling from what I've seen online. Um, there you go. Go see it. Four four stars and a heart for me. You should see it so you can have your own opinion and tell me I'm wrong. But I look forward to the conversation about this movie, and I really hope this movie sits well with you like it did with me. But if it doesn't, talk to me about it. All right. Talk to you soon. Very soon. Obsession up next.

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Robbie Holmes

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