Backrooms (Kane Parsons, 2026)

[CSM126]

Spoiler

Clark was keeping Kat’s severed head in the fridge of his “house”, so I don’t think we’ll see her again

[colinr0380]

And that's why I need to see the film again!

Here's Screen Daily on Backrooms taking £4.3 million in the UK and Ireland over the weekend, which is apparently the highest that a horror film has ever opened to in the territories, over a million more than the previous holder of that record, the hot off Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe starring The Woman In Black film from 2012.

[CSM126]

Spoiler

I suppose there could always be a still life of Kat, which leads me to ask:

Do we think the female creature Clark scalps is a copy of his ex-wife? If so, her/its reaction to Captain Clark (running and hiding) would say a lot about how Clark actually treated his wife. He says he just woke her up a lot but what if he was beating her? This guy might be even more monstrous than he seems on first impression. Definitely need to see this again to really soak it up and analyze what is being said about this creepy dude.

[colinr0380]

Spoiler

I guess it can also be a suggestion of Clark's conflicted nature about the way his marriage ended as well. That somehow a part of him knows that it wasn't just the argument of that one night that collapsed the marriage and the reaction of the Still Life there is his subconscious trying to get through to him. Although it is overwhelmed by his, um, more 'oral' urges. I don't know if that is the Freudian overcoming the Jungian, or something like that!

I like that tying Mary to the chair is like he is wanting therapy, but only on his terms and only if she tells him what he wants to hear. Which may be why she has to become more aggressive in response, along with having to try and get out of there!

I love that in addition to the usual suspects we are getting response articles to the film from places like Psychology Today and Architectural Digest as well. The picture in that Architectural Review piece reminded me of the tiny door that Clark has to scramble to get through which is very Alice in Wonderland-esque, and also reappears again in Mary's section of the film.

And I spent much of today wondering if Clark bedding down in his furniture store for the night would pair up well with the department store after dark sequences in Chaplin's Modern Times!

[pizza time!]

If you're remotely interested in seeing this... stay off YouTube. Apparently the attention economy demands that you must spoil the film in your thumbnail.

Spoiler

A few thoughts: As a fan of the web series, I was prepared to roast the psychodrama turn but it's been resonating with me in ways I didn't expect. Especially the dinner scene with Mary's "you are your brain, dipshit!" line. It's as if Mary is projecting in that moment as well as speaking to Clark, and these two individuals who are opposites in terms of "success" are having a moment where they are not so dissimilar. Even though there is a small moment of redemption for Clark in accepting the reality of who he is and releasing Mary, it is still cathartic to see the hero narrative upended into a loser narrative, of a once-protagonist actually choosing no one, no place, with no ceremony—basically disappearing. His shadow version or whatever it was, is such a raw depiction of insecurity, like holy shit. The dynamic between Clark and Mary reminds me of the warped relationship to success we have these days, where it's not really about succeeding but deceiving yourself into an idea of success.

It makes me wonder if the focus on character interiors was Kane's idea or his writer. A way for audiences to warm up to the concept, perhaps? I would assume it was Soodik since Kane couldn't be less interested in character in his web series, and apparently is already looking for a new writer. But the changes don't necessarily conflict with what Kane was doing (he has made it a point to mention its canon), it just adds another complicated layer to it.

[Mr Sausage]

I liked how the film handled the backrooms themselves a lot more than I liked any of its organization into a proper film. The discovery, the exploration, the mapping, everything about that whole process was excellent and unnerving. But the drama and character dynamics felt schematic and the symbolism over-determined.

Spoiler

The dominant motif is iteration, with iteration giving a sense of endlessness, and therefore openness, but actually closing everyone off in loops that degenerate. The film applies the theme endlessly across its characters, storytelling, and visual style, such that I felt beat about the head. Just take the image of false freedom that dominates the movie, nowhere more obvious than the recurring gag of the window or open doorway seeming to show outside only for the sky and trees to be revealed as wallpaper. This is recapitulated on a visual level in every scene outside the backrooms (most rooms have small windows that rarely seem to look out on anything), and also becomes the final ambiguity the film is building towards: whether the windows in Reinsve's interrogation room show the sky or more wallpaper. It's recapitulated again in the story, with Reinsve using the window as her chief therapeutic symbol even as she's unable to lead herself or Ejiofor towards any freedom (including memories of a mother who wouldn't let her look out windows). The movie then reinforces this particular theme by iterating both copies of Reinsve's book and her tv commercial, books and commercials being, of course, mechanized iterations of images, ideas, identities, etc. This is all on top of the other big dramatic instance of iteration: Reinsve's therapeutic technique involves dramatic repetitions of crisis moments while she is herself stuck brooding on traumatic memories associated with two locations.

This is stifling. And, hey, maybe the proliferation of the same two or three symbols across all interpretive levels is a metacommentary on the backrooms themselves, the audience trapped and smothered by the film's own meaning-making system much as people in the backrooms are trapped in the detritus of their own memories. But that'd very conceptual and theoretical for a movie that, as plays, is practical and direct in how it communicates. Plus the point of the backrooms is that they feel both constrained and endless, where the film's visual and thematic overdetermination is only constrained. So densely theoretical or not, the stifling way of generating meaning wouldn't be a successful recapitulation of its setting even if that were intended.

Anyway, structurally the movie rests on a common fantasy trope, a doorway leading to magical realm that sits adjacent to our own. Narnia is the big instance, but you find it in other works of popular fantasy like His Dark Materials, Little, Big, and even a recent bestselling fantasy novel whose world shares a lot in common with the backrooms as conceived in this movie (whose title I'm hesitant to name because me saying all this is kind of a spoiler). That this magical space is also a allegory for the human mind, especially its conceptual structures, is conventional, too. So Parsons has made a horror version of a common fantasy story, right down to the themes and the quest structure latent in the story (a gender-swapped quest to rescue someone trapped in a maze while pursued by a monster).

The movie is limited by the constraints of conventional characterization and storytelling plucked from fantasy. I'd like to see the concepts freed from those things and taken somewhere more unpredictable, because there's a lot of potential in the concept.

[colinr0380]

An interesting Hollywood Reporter article on the trend of YouTube to Cinema:

Traditional Hollywood studio types have largely been ecstatic about the box office bonanza. I’m not sure their reaction should be so unqualified. “This is very good. Young audiences loving movies. Going to see THEIR movies. Not their parents’ franchises,” an executive at a large studio texted me. The problem is “their movies” are decidedly not his movies.

The smart ones will be part of it, of course; Chernin Entertainment did fund Backrooms. But part isn’t the same as leading. You can add as much Focus and A24 to these projects as you like; you can put as many Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jason Blum names as your heart desires — this is a phenomenon generated, driven and controlled by creators and the biggest company in the world that amplifies them. This is good news for theaters, who just want bankable product. Distributors and financiers and legacy studios? They’ll come in and out of this new ecosystem. Some movies will completely shut out any element of the traditional business like Iron Lung did; some will let in select entities, like Obsession and Backrooms did. And plenty of other models yet to be devised. Festivals will need to re-evaluate their roles too. I’m already getting wind of at least one major gathering negotiating with YouTube to give them space at their event. You can fight this or get on board.

I'm just excited at the idea for the likes of Briscoe Park, Gemini Home Entertainment, Alex Kister (The Mandela Catalogue) or Greylock to make the leap too. Not to mention Local58! (which kind of did get a leap into legacy media with the Channel Zero series)
___

Here's a video about the "Colour Theory" of the film, which in its comments about Clark wearing a muted purple shirt makes me think of how that bleeds into the much richer purple 'throne' and perhaps suggests that even the most downtrodden people often want to be rulers of their own personal fiefdoms. I also like this comment under the video:

Purple isn’t a real colour in the way other colours are. It’s a combination of red and blue though those colours exist at opposite ends of the spectrum [wavelength?]. Our mind creates purple, in a sense.

And Stephen E. Andrews has recommended books in a similar vein to the film, so I have even more titles to add to my reading list now!