Backrooms

When BACKROOMS came out in May, I was annoyed by the hype. I kept seeing articles about the rise of “liminal horror” which, as far as I could tell, boiled down to people pretending to be afraid of hallways and empty malls. Like so many annoying things it was born on the internet in Youtube videos and “creepypasta,” which is a word not even good enough to use as a placeholder. I object to its common usage, I resent that I had to repeat it, and I assert my rights as an old person to not have to be totally sure I know its definition. Whatever it is I disagree with it, so I was skeptical of this BACKROOMS, to say the least.

But the movie was an undeniable phenomenon. It wasn’t as big as OBSESSION, but a $10 million movie making $401 million is significant, whether or not it’s written and directed by a 20-year-old named Kane Parsons. The word on it was positive from all age groups, and it stars Chiwetel Eijiofor and Renate Reinsve, which kind of makes it a real movie. So, like with OBSESSION, I accepted that it was probly gonna be pretty good, it wasn’t fair for me to pre-judge it, and I let my guard down. Mostly.

Ejiofor plays Clark, a guy who owns a furniture store called Clark’s Ottoman Empire. He had a bad divorce because he was at the furniture store too much, and now he lives at the store. I thought it was supposed to be going out of business (it’s mostly empty, mostly unstaffed, mostly without customers) but I guess not, because he has his only known employees Kat (Lukita Maxwell, AFRAID) and Bobby (Finn Bennett, WARFARE) tape a commercial with him playing a pirate. I did not find this to be a believable or well thought out fictional business, but it makes more sense than the beloved and heavily merchandised corn syrup clown mascot of CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD, so I’m gonna give it a pass.

There have been electrical problems in the building, and while looking around trying to fix it he notices light coming from behind a crack in the wall. When he touches the wall he falls through it like it’s a portal. On the other side is a shifting maze of similar bland hallways and rooms, mostly empty but sometimes there’s furniture that’s piled up or weirdly shaped or protruding from the floor as if reaching in from another dimension.

Reinsve (SENTIMENTAL VALUE) plays Clark’s therapist Mary. In the first appointment we see with her she role plays as his wife, she needles him about having too many beers and failing to become an architect, and he gets too into it and has a mean fight with her. Not even at all self conscious about revealing to his therapist that he’s a jerk. The second appointment is even more uncomfortable because he tries to tell her about the Backrooms, he’s very manic, and she’s understandably perplexed until he storms out saying he’ll prove it and she’ll have to apologize.

So that’s when he gets Kat and Bobby to come with him into the Backrooms, with Bobby’s camera. I’m sorry to report that this long, pivotal set piece is presented as found footage. It has a gimmick that I don’t think makes sense but is pretty cool: they tie a rope to Bobby as he walks down a steep hallway to find out what’s at the bottom. Answer: a dirty room with some piles of clothes, plus some kind of horrifying monster of terror. You don’t see the creature but would you believe it if I told you IT CHASES HIM AND THEN THE CAMERA FALLS DOWN? Never before have your pants been so shitted.

There are obviously good found footage movies, but to build up to a confrontation with something scary and then just have a bunch of jostling and breathing and then the video stops, that doesn’t work on me anymore. When it cuts back to the real movie and it’s Mary in her life and she figures out her patient has gone missing and decides to check on him, that I like. That’s a good structure.

Ejiofor is a great actor, he’s been one of my guys since REDBELT, but this movie isn’t so kind to him, because it identifies two acting feats he can’t pull off as smoothly as the regular ones:

1. Walking around for a long time looking at stuff and being surprised

2. Saying scripted dialogue in a found footage format

I’m not saying he’s terrible, but his acting in these contexts really calls attention to the fact that yep, this guy is acting. Ooh, look how he touches that weird chair he found. Hear how he grunts as he crawls through a little door. Acting. (Somehow Reinsve does better with that stuff.)

It’s not bad. It’s a pretty well made movie. It’s pretty imaginative. It’s not for me. I wish I’d seen it without the hype, not knowing it was directed by a 20 year old, so I wouldn’t be thinking oh I get it, he thinks analog video and buzzing fluorescent lights and ugly yellow walls are creepy because they’re before his time. It’s not that different from how scratchy old film has denoted scary for so long, or an old timey song playing on a tinny speaker from somewhere. Which, incidentally, Parsons also does. Some tropes never die.

It seems to be set in the early ‘90s. My teenage years, Parson’s negative-ten years. We know this mainly because there’s an anti-apartheid t-shirt and a large computer monitor. It doesn’t feel anything like the ’90s to me, but I’m sure the sixties period pieces I watched didn’t feel like the sixties to my parents. It happens.

Although it’s mostly about two adult characters experiencing simulated adult problems, it’s tuned to the fears and tastes of a young person. If you grew up on Youtube videos and horror video games then wandering around looking at things and hearing weird sounds is a powerful scare experience, I assume. I can admire it a little like I would a haunted house maze, but I want something more. (I have also read that this is an extension of a 25 episode web series by Parsons, itself inspired by internet writings based on a photo of an empty yellow furniture room store posted on 4chan? Now a major motion picture. I should’ve known the Wikipedia page for this was none of my business.)

I was intrigued by a glimpse somewhere of a bizarre spindly creature that must be from the web series, but it’s not in the movie. Instead the thing terrorizing them turns out to be a tall pirate mascot (7’ 7” Robert Bobroczkyi, also the Offspring in ALIEN: ROMULUS) with a cartoony animatronic Chiwetel face. I laughed out loud. I’m surprised if that’s something the young people find creepy, but more power to them.

Fortunately, there is a little more payoff than that, some strange business that I’ve heard described as sort of a parallel to AI, the way it creates iterations of people who once existed but doesn’t get them right. I like that reading. But before it got there I kept thinking this should be called WOULDN’T IT BE SO FREAKY THOUGH IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT? Other than the rote found footage shake-scares there aren’t many scares per se – it’s more about the psychological terror of wouldn’t it be weird if there was a weird place. I assume that’s real creepy to some, while others are invested in the mythology about the people who know about and are exploring the Backrooms (Mark Duplass) which I guess is what you care about if you watch the web videos or the version that was re-released in theaters with some extra video thing after the credits. It reminds me of the online worldbuilding stuff they used to market THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and CLOVERFIELD, except in this case that was the original work and the movie was the tie-in.

Last week when I reviewed OBSESSION I argued that writer/director Curry Barker coming from Youtube wasn’t anything new – he made horror shorts and a feature, he was practicing before he worked on a bigger scale. Parsons is a little different just because he wasn’t an independent filmmaker working on a shoestring – he was courted by studios to adapt his viral videos, so he had many more resources to work with. Between the two I would definitely not have guessed that BACKROOMS is the one that cost ten times as much as the other one, but I guess maybe it’s just to pay those two great actors.

I know I’d be easier on BACKROOMS if it was just a regular movie nobody had said much about. So take my complaints with a grain of salt. I got nothing much against it. I definitely don’t want scary hallway to become the dominant type of horror movie, but I’ve been around the block a few times. There’s always some new popular subgenre we all get mad about, and life goes on. And then there’s another one. It’s fine. Have fun in the hallways, kids.

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Related posts:

1. Obsession
2. Four Brothers
3. Serenity
4. Redbelt

Chiwetel Ejiofor Finn Bennett Kane Parsons Lukita Maxwell Mark Duplass Renate Reinsve Robert Bobroczkyi scary hallway

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2026 at 7:36 am and is filed under Reviews, Horror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

42 Responses to “Backrooms”

1. 

   jojo

   October 5th, 2026 at 8:31 am

   Walking around for a long time looking at stuff and being surprised

   Fixed that for you

   I didn’t look at my watch, but the sequence where Ejiofor discovers DA BACKROOMZ, and walks around marveling a dusty yellow wallpaper while spooky music drones seemed to go on for 25 minutes. The only purpose I could figure out for this was “we built a really big set, so you’re going to see every last inch of it”

   (I noticed the DVD promises “16 more minutes!!!!!!” Can’t wait…)

   Other than that… I kinda liked what the movie was ultimately was shooting for, but probably needed a much better director to pull it off. Things that shouldn’t be in one’s horror movie in 2026:

   -‘Found footage’ sequence where cameraperson is desperately attempting to run from monster, yet won’t stop filming.
   -‘Homage’ to Texas Chainsaw dinner scene
   -“But, it’s not about monsters, it’s really about…”

   etc

2. 

   Bill Reed

   October 5th, 2026 at 9:05 am

   I liked this more than you. SPOILERS?

   For a child, Parsons manages to synthesize a lot of age-old material into something, if not totally new, than at least interesting and absorbing. I was reminded of Theseus and the Minotaur, Plato’s Cave, The Yellow Wallpaper, Jordan Peele’s US, and lots of video games, from the Atari era to today. No-clipping through walls in a game and wandering outside the world, finding remnants of abandoned code. But filling that with recursive nightmare echoes of our lives, or iterative gen-AI replications of our world. I think the cavernous furniture store is actually a great fit, thematically. It’s a vast, empty simulacrum of the family home, something the main characters have lost. It’s not too different from the Backrooms already. And Parsons hits on something that I guess The Yoots have figured out: the whole world is backrooms now. Homes are unaffordable, stores are empty, third spaces are dead, the internet is hollowed out. And sure, fluorescent lighting connotes existential dread.

   I agree the found-footage sequence is probably the weakest part. It lost me when he picks the camera back up after some serious shit has gone down.

3. 

   TomKessler75

   October 5th, 2026 at 9:48 am

   I had a feeling you weren’t going to like this since it fits into the surreal, ghost story, David Lynchian abstract surrealism thing. And I totally understand why that doesn’t work for perfectly reasonable people even if it’s catnip to my neuro-atypical self.

   Another reason I was drawn to this movie is that it reminds me of dreams I’ve had going back to childhood. And that’s my read on what may or may not be the explanation for it: The backrooms pocket dimension or whatever it is populates itself with the subconscious of humans who are in the vicinity of a no-clip doorway or who come into contact with it. So, for most of the movie, the space is populated with Clark’s admittedly sad subconscious. Towards the end of the movie **SPOILERS*, the new expansions seem as if they emanate from Mary’s subconscious.

   I like that better than this is all symbolic for A.I. “hallucination” since our dreams remember things weirdly too. But I suppose both explanations fit.

   Why the backrooms do not seem to populate based on the A-Sync scientists, however, I could not say.

   But I’ve spent some time with the A24 exclusive (for now) blu ray and have a little insight into why the movie is so relatively expensive.

   For starters, they really did have a fairly large production. It seems they took over a Vancouver studio, had five soundstages and a video village. That’s pretty cool.

   But what may really bake your noodle to know is that this movie is loaded with digital VFX or. That doesn’t bother me as much as it may bother others for some reason, but what really blew my mind is how invisible much of it is to my non-animator eye. There set extensions and even entire shots in the movie which are 100% CGI, my favorite being the one in which the camera seems to descend through multiple levels of Mary’s childhood home. Makes it seem like the backrooms are some modern version of Dante’s “Inferno.”

   But the one I found the funniest is the fact that Clark’s peg-leg gag in his amusingly shitty furniture commercial is also CGI! Yes, damn it, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s knee strapped to a table leg are CGI in a shaky-cam VHS routine, because they realized that was the safest way to do it. And I can’t argue, since my first reaction to that scene was to wince at his knee in that fetish club-looking strap rather than thing, “Man, CGI is bullshit!” Good work, guys!

4. 

   Skani

   October 5th, 2026 at 10:07 am

   I had a blast with this one as well. Thought the performances were great, the themes and acting were excellent. Does the uncanny, eerie, atmospheric psychological Lynchian horror thing right.

   Based on some things I’ve read, I’m concerned that Parsons actually has a fully worked out mythology for this world that he plans to delve into in the future— that strikes me as almost certainly a fatal miscalculation. Dream logic doesn’t and shouldn’t lend itself to satisfactory discursive, linear narrative resolution, but we’ll see.

   Anyway, I liked this even better than OBSESSION, which I think I loved.

5. 

   Charles

   October 5th, 2026 at 10:24 am

   This wasn’t my cup of tea either. I was into the first half but when it became all about trauma it lost me.

6. 

   TKFopp

   October 5th, 2026 at 10:38 am

   I saw this and OBSESSION back to back one weekend in theaters, my 50+ self wanting to check out “the young people horror”, what the kids were up to these days. And I liked them both – I wasn’t actually scared by either, but I was engaged by them, and both play great with a crowd. But I found BACKROOMS the more interesting of the two. I was curious going in as to what about this concept had it blow up so much over the past few years. There’s the isolation from COVID having an influence, sure, but I really found it interesting that this generation is actually terrified of being trapped in world of that MY generation (and older) made for them. Tossed off and banal objects/décor, the stuff you have to go through when grandma passes – not the cool stuff in their old house, but the generic stuff in their room at the retirement community. I don’t think their afraid of empty rooms or “hallways”, and they know the backrooms is seemingly 80% nothing happening. (I think) they’re afraid of being trapped that in that nothingness forever. Where everything including light is artificial, and the only fresh air is what you brought in with your own lungs. That wandering may just go on forever, with no hope or even imagination, until if you’re lucky, you get an abrupt bad end from some THING that stumbles upon you. And that’s your life now, one wrong step and now you’re here, no backs-ies.

   I think BACKROOMS and the whole backroom concept (in artwork, memes, icth.io horror games or what have you) are a generation wrestling with the realization that they’re f—ked with a world with no future , and the thing that’s f—cking them is the most banal, color saturated end that barely seems to be aware of them – Eldritch Old Gods remitted as old Sears catalogues, Shermin Williams #6393, and community pool areas.

   And for the record I did like the Clark monster. Again, not something I’m going imagine waiting for me when I get up to go to the bathroom in the night, but I liked the idea of what Clarke would consider his most low, embarrassing moment – now walking around immortalized by this place, for everyone to see. The final humiliation. It makes me wonder what my version would look like, and would I be able to laugh it off or not.

   I’m curious what Parsons will go next with this, or what he will do outside of the Backrooms concept. I found his style much more formal than Barker’s on OBSESSION, which Barker admits he was framing a lot for that movie’s future long life in Tiktok clips. That kinda bugs my old man ass, but I can’t argue it’s a smart move. But I’m truly excited to see what both of these guys get up to next, the kids are going to be all right. Barring that whole no future thing, I guess.

7. 

   Mr. Majestyk

   October 5th, 2026 at 1:09 pm

   Yes! A grumpy Vern review! Just hook it to my veins!

   I’m glad the kids are doing their own thing, but if even Vern can’t get into this thing, I’m reasonably certain it would kill me. I’ll probably check out OBSESSION one of these days but I feel confident that I can go to my grave without ever seeing a frame of this one.

8. 

   jojo

   October 5th, 2026 at 1:23 pm

   Oh, I guess I should add I just went to the movies to see something, saw a horror movie with Chiwetel Eijiofor was starting in 10 minutes, and said “okay”. I wasn’t aware this was an internet sensation created by a 19-year-old wunderkind. And only learned that part afterwards.

   Eh… I’m not sure it would have made much of a difference (although I’ll never know for sure). I guess it’s cool that a 19-year-old has seen Solaris. Maybe he will have watched some Ingmar Bergman by the time he makes his next movie, because I think that’s ultimately what he’s gunning for.

9. 

   Alex R

   October 5th, 2026 at 1:33 pm

   Agreed with Bill and TKFopp on liking this. And while I, too, liked the Clark monster, I wish there weren’t any living things in the backrooms. The idea of a gigantic, shifting world structured without any logic, that you could easily get lost in forever, as TKFopp says, was scary enough for me. The most unsettling part of the movie was when Renate got reknocked out and woke up in a part of the backrooms we hadn’t seen yet, because I had no idea how you’d ever get back out if all the walls looked the same and the doors out were invisible. And then that fear goes away when a team of Async scientists emerge like the guards from Legends of the Hidden Temple and get her out. I like building a scare around the feeling that you’re being punished for exploring too much.

   I think people are right about the backrooms representing a hopelessness for where we are and where we’re going, and I think it gets diluted a little when you’ve got the monsters that look like people run through AI (though I liked the way they looked). My read on liminal horror was never that something could jump out and get you in an empty expo center, but that there’s something sad and eerie, for reasons I can’t put my finger on, about being in an empty expo center. It’s the feeling I get when I’m at an airport or train station at 2am and even the McDonald’s is closed and everybody’s gone. “I’m not supposed to be here, nobody’s supposed to be here right now.” That kind of loneliness is odd because it’s often in hotels (as with The Shining, which must be a big influence on that whole genre) or parking garages or office buildings, where there are supposed to be people. The horror part of liminal horror doesn’t do much for me, I guess, but the endless, unnavigable space does. I don’t like most Lovecraftian horror, especially the stuff about things you wouldn’t be able to comprehend, but I like this, which is basically the opposite. It’s easy to imagine this because it’s a bare room with ugly lighting, you’ve probably had to get things from storage spaces that look like this at school/work/whatever. It’s just like the big space behind your high school gym, full of nothing but stacks of chairs and an empty popcorn machine, and you got a look one time because the janitor left the door unlocked. It is extremely fathomable. The unfathomable part in the backrooms is how many similar rooms it’s connected to.

   Or it’s like the little grass hill the characters in Office Space have to walk across to get to work, in that everything looks intentionally constructed, but the more you interact with it, the less it feels like it was designed to be used by a person. I like that the backrooms is a combo of those types of rooms.

   Also a note if you, like me, didn’t see this in theaters but streamed it on HBO Max: The extra footage is basically a ~20 minute prequel short and plays on the Max version after the credits have rolled. I left the film running and was surprised it had a post-credits sequence, and was even more surprised when the post-credits sequence kept going and going. Even as somebody who liked the movie, I found the extra stuff was unnecessary.

10. 

    Kim Cardassian

    October 5th, 2026 at 2:40 pm

    Count me as among the “liked this,” although I’m definitely one of those annoying internet dweebs who’s living vicariously through the story of a 20yo horror fan who got a hollywood budget and, seemingly, minimal oversight. It’s not even the first time this has happened to me! When they announced the Slender Man YouTube series Marble Hornets was getting turned into a movie, I was over the moon – holy shit, that internet horror project I love is getting the hollywood treatment! – and then……uh, let’s just say it turned out way better this time lol

    And while I liked the movie a lot, I’m genuinely curious what it’ll look like if/when Kane steps outside his niche. I was also a big fan of his one non-Backrooms project, “The Oldest View,” but it is basically “what if instead of yellow wallpaper it was a guy wandering an abandoned mall?”

11. 

    Gavolt

    October 5th, 2026 at 4:23 pm

    Yeah, I thought this one was 15% intriguing, and 85% boring and dumb. It was like an unsuccessful painting where there is nowhere on the canvas for your eye to settle on.

12. 

    Crudnasty

    October 5th, 2026 at 4:39 pm

    As the kind of self described Luddite who has a moral stance against watching any YouTube hosted video that isn’t an instructional how-to demonstration or a recording of an actual real movie, real music video or real television show made by people Christian Bale would consider professionals, I only know of this back room thing through hearsay and the officially licensed movietization. But if Mike “Baron Mordo” Terry is in it, it seems worth watching.

    I come to this conclusion through the deep prejudice of finding literally anything “creepypasta” or 4chan adjacent to be eye rolling at best and actively soul corroding at worst. But sometimes the analysis of these movies seems even more interesting than to me than the actual movies, like the theory that the back rooms are the result of some kind of interdimensional pinhole camera effect, or an MRI machine that somehow ripped a hole in space time. And that makes me think this movie is more like PRIMER than an actual scary movie, which seems more like something I could get into.

13. 

    so-and-so

    October 5th, 2026 at 4:41 pm

    this is the film that directly triggered this past summer’s psychotic break. the upshot is that this 20-year-old son of a therapist and a video game designer had a better psychoanalytic read on my entire deal than any other filmmaker whose work i’ve come across and got me to fully realize and accept that i’m trans and need to live the latter half of my life much differently than i ever have before.

    the quality of the film, then, is kind of irrelevant to me but it helps that it’s something that i’d be happy having hooked up to my veins regardless. the general tone and aesthetic reminded me of skittles’ mid-2000s ad campaigns and as someone who still doesn’t understand why the evil glam rock witch in Longlegs was supposedly risible while the evil clown makeup witch in Weapons supposedly wasn’t, i was fully attuned to everything this film was going for and loved that the monster at the end of the book was such a patently ridiculous figure. there’s a radu jude film from a few years ago that ends(?) with a 45-minute fully static shot of a family sitting dead center in the frame as a commercial prepares to shoot around them and it’s maybe the single most invigorating thing i’ve seen in a film so i’m very ready for found footage films to cut out all of the tropos and drama and just give me people pointing camcorders at odd spaces forever.

    after i watched this i found out that kids have been creating thousands of backrooms videos over the past few years. if you’re monied and have a vr headset and a decent pc then it’s now possible to create convincing walkthroughs of your blender environments that increasingly blur the line between pre-viz and production-ready assets. the backrooms craze, then, seems more like a necessary part of learning to walk before these kids move on to more interesting visual pastures and we start getting first-person tours of pandora or whatever. that’s an exciting prospect speaking as someone who is otherwise very skeptical about much of this technology

    i appreciate TKFopp’s thoughts shared above. i mentioned it in the Resident Evil talkback but i’m going to recommend The Exit 8 once again to anyone who is turned off by what Backrooms is doing but might be interested in a more conventional version of the same material

14. 

    Chuck

    October 5th, 2026 at 5:33 pm

    Started watching this on a plane this afternoon and had to turn it off after 15 minutes, amateur hour nonsense. I could hypothetically seem myself enjoying a creepy movie about how scary unoccupied spaces can be but my god, not all children with YouTube accounts are equipped to make movies.

15. 

    Hammer Time

    October 5th, 2026 at 7:58 pm

    Shout out to Vern’s site for being a place where someone can reference the mound in Office Space in an academic way and a different person can note that this film influenced them coming out as trans. What a community! Something you would have found a lot in the early internet days but which is sadly lacking now. So here’s to Vern.

    I saw this this summer with my wife and two kids. One kid ran into the lobby because they were too scared and the other proclaimed it one of their top five favorite movies. Both insane reactions (not that scary, not that good).

    I thought it was fine. I don’t have a strong negative reaction to “creepypasta” (something to do with “copy paste” if I recall) and have read some decent ones over the years. I haven’t really seen that many Backrooms videos but as someone who worked at a mall winter breaks in college and had to report to work at around 7am (in Oregon in November, which is a dark time), there is something inherently creepy about the spaces behind the stores in an empty mall. So, I get the liminal spaces thing.

    I thought the movie was partially successful but also a lot of a slog. I would add an issue with Ejiofor is I don’t really know what accent he’s going for in this and he is just amazingly miscast. Everyone seems miscast. I don’t know if this is a “the first 8 people refused” or “new director, who is willing to work with him?” thing but I didn’t really believe any of the actors. I think they are all good actors, just this wasn’t the movie for them.

    I thought the “monster” was likely intentionally kind of goofy. I don’t think it is supposed to be scary like the weird spider monster thing in the youtube ones is scary. I think it is supposed to be unsettling, like a giant mascot but the noises it makes and the speed it can run make it a unnerving.

    Everything about the “found footage” part is true and I have no idea why it had to be “found footage.” Speaking of which, even though I saw this at the cheap/second run theater, it was the “Everything Must Go” version with the extra sixteen minutes. My best guess is that this sixteen minutes (which, spoilers, has NOTHING to do with the narrative) is actually the screen test to convince executives this could be a real movie and that Parsons was capable of directing it. It is almost alarmingly boring. Outside of completists, I have no idea who would enjoy this “additional material.” It is bad. It confuses realism (as in, these appear to be actual scientific videos of the backrooms) with interesting, and it is not. So, if you haven’t yet watched it, I would say, don’t stay until after the credits. Or, at the very least, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

16. 

    CJ Holden

    October 6th, 2026 at 1:02 am

    I am half amused and amazed by all the interpretations of this thing when it basically originated as “Here is a picture of a hallway. Now imagine you walk through it and when you turn around, it has changed and the exit is gone. Boo. Scary! Made it up five minutes ago. Took me like 30 seconds.” Sure, one can say that good art leads to many interpretations, but if I remember the original scarynoodle even had to add some monsters into the mix. So it was not just “Ooooooh, long, empty hallway”, but “Something is chasing me through this ever changing hallway”.

    And I can see how that works. In fact: My first encounter with the BACKROOMS concept was a clip from one of those video games about it, where the player was running through the hallways, turned around and saw a quick glimpse of something that looked like a bad ant doodle coming around the corner, before he kept running, then fell through a hole in the ground and suddenly plummeted to his death from the sky. That actually got me a bit excited when the movie was announced, but when I heard that this is not a surreal nonstop chase movie with a monster, my excitement dampened.

    And honestly, I almost believe that this is why people think this is scary. Not because it’s an empty hallway that symbolizes whatever, because there are internet stories that tell you that some point a monster comes around the corner. It’s like the ocean. Swimming isn’t scary. Unless you saw Jaws.

    However, if and why someone would find hallways scary is up to them. I personally don’t think they are scary or depressing. I actually find them really cozy. But we had in the review for the fucking EXORCIST the argument that this movie isn’t scary because demonic possession is a concept that can only scare religious people.

17. 

    Dooley the Gravedigger

    October 6th, 2026 at 1:26 am

    I quite liked it. Despite whining in some quarters about folks attributing meaning to the movie, there are fairly obvious metaphors in a story where both a therapist and her client spend a lot of private time rummaging around in the past, and not being totally thrilled at what they find.

    I think the extended found footage POV worked fine, the alternatives being a super clear HD POV shot like RUSSIAN ARK or HARDCORE HENRY, or a camera-behind-the-actors set piece that looks like you’re following a video game character. I’m not sure if either of those options would be better than what we got. Equally, the kids go down on the rope, then get grabbed by something unseen. Would it have been scarier to any degree if we’d clearly seen the monster at that point? I suspect it would have removed some of the mystery.

    I think making the 90’s not like the 90’s is something that makes the film weirder, and I don’t think it would have been better if everything had looked, sounded and smelt like outtakes from REALITY BITES. But all good, at least Vern liked OBSESSION so that’s one out of those two that he found worthwhile.

18. 

    Alex R

    October 6th, 2026 at 6:50 am

    so-and-so– Congrats and good luck on your journey.

    Hammer Time– 30 mins or so into this, I honestly thought “Damn, Chiwetel Eijiofor is doing a good American accent where it doesn’t sound like he’s stopping before every word to make sure his diction is on target” (like your Benedict Cumberbatches and occasionally your Gary Oldmen), so I’m surprised to see you say that. I’m sure you’re right and I was just digging on the movie and giving him bonus points– I need to watch it again with an ear out for that. I seem to be the only person here who thought Eijiofor did a good job as a bewildered prick who thought everybody was against him.

19. 

    BuzzFeedAldrin

    October 6th, 2026 at 9:04 am

    I’m with Vern on this one. I really enjoyed Parsons’ YT Backrooms videos and hoped the movie would lean more into the Lovecraftian horror of those. Instead, I guess someone showed him a David Lynch film or two before he directed this so…yawn.

20. 

    grimgrinningchris

    October 6th, 2026 at 12:32 pm

    Back a couple of months ago during a day of errands and lunch out, my sister and I decided we wanted to see a movie, but didn’t know what. We went to our local-est theater (I can actually see it from my street) without looking up a schedule. The next two movies starting were OBSESSION and BACKROOMS… We knew that both were being talked about positively and were both horrors made by YouTubers, but that was either. Neither of us had even seen a trailer for either of them.
    Looking over the posters, we both agreed that although Blumhouse was really spotty, that A24 had rarely let us down (we have very similar tastes) so we chose BACKROOMS. We chose wrong.

    Although we liked and appreciated the experience of BACKROOMS we also both agreed that it felt kind of empty (the theater was too… but it was midday). In hindsight, I would have MUCH rather experienced OBSESSION with a full audience.

21. 

    Hammer Time

    October 6th, 2026 at 3:01 pm

    @Alex R, yeah, I should have been more clear. To me it sounded like he was doing… New York? Like Bronx? Which given that the movie takes place in (Arizona/California) was just a specific choice. It isn’t so much that he can’t do the accent, it was the accent he chose.

    This video at 3:14 has an example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQox6v41yNE&list=PLKUX1zwKRfWg) He says “I feel stupid doing that” as “I feel stoopid doin’ thaaaaa.”

    Also, a point I failed to make earlier – my wife went in thinking it would be about a guy who gets lost in this maze of backrooms and I think that would have made for a far better movie than “monster chase woman.”

22. 

    Hammer Time

    October 6th, 2026 at 3:05 pm

    @Alex R, yeah, I should have been more clear. To me it sounded like he was doing… New York? Like Bronx? Which given that the movie takes place in (Arizona/California) was just a specific choice. It isn’t so much that he can’t do the accent, it was the accent he chose.

    This video at 3:14 has an example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQox6v41yNE&list=PLKUX1zwKRfWg) He says “I feel stupid doing that” as “I feel stoopid doin’ thaaaaa.”

    Also, a point I failed to make earlier – my wife went in thinking it would be about a guy who gets lost in this maze of backrooms and I think that would have made for a far better movie than “monster chase woman.”

23. 

    Ben Railton

    October 6th, 2026 at 3:11 pm

    Just wanted to add to this typically awesome Outlaw Vern Comments Discussion that I think the excellent novel House of Leaves (2000) has to be considered an interesting influence on this film.

24. 

    Curt

    October 6th, 2026 at 4:00 pm

    Being trapped in a weird alien/industrial environment and not being able to get out is a timelessly cool weird sci-fi-horror premise, one which has been done before (I’ve never seen the CUBE movies, but I’ve seen Jim Henson’s THE CUBE which had this premise back in the 1960s).

    So I think people are getting carried away with the whole “OMG a 20-year-old YouTuber who thinks the 1990s are old, this must be about Gen Z’s relationship to dying malls and late capitalism etc” angle.

    And I especially think it’s iffy to treat all that as a negative rather than a point of interest. If my hunch is correct that the median age for this community is Gen X or older millennials, then I just gotta say: Come on, guys. We’re supposed to be the cool ones. We grew up knowing from experience how frustrating it is to deal with older people dunking on the good new stuff. If you didn’t like the movie that’s fine – it’s a bit minimalist, which is not always my favorite flavor either – but we don’t have to turn it into “Ugh, these kids today with their slang and their Reddit.”

    And so what if there’s backstory mythology for all this on YouTube. I’ve never seen a frame of Kane Parsons’ previous online work and I still dug this movie a lot. (It’s interesting how this chat seems divided between “they’re lost in a building? That’s it?” and “oh no, backstory would kill it by explaining it too much.” To each their own, I guess.)

    Maybe that’s a paradox of our age group: on the one hand we claim to miss the pre-Internet monoculture, when we all watched HBO and network TV and had shared reference points… but then when something new like BACKROOMS or THE ODYSSEY does finally somehow break out enough to meme-worthy, we act like the mainstream is being rammed down our throat.

    I also suspect that when some people complain that they don’t like modern horror movies, the part they’re not admitting is that when they say they’re a fan of horror movies they really just mean slasher movies. Weird and unsettling is also horror. Yes we all have favorite movies that we could happily watch all the time. But we’ve already seen those. New stuff is available too.

    (I didn’t notice anything odd about the lead actor’s accent. However the lead actress was just odd enough in her diction to suggest to me that English might not be her first language.)

25. 

    CJ Holden

    October 6th, 2026 at 10:11 pm

    I don’t think “I don’t like modern horror movies” means “I only like slashers”. It’s more like that we just had a decade or two where horror movies were basically dramas about mental health or slow burners with all the slow but none of the burn. A bunch of them worked really well but most of them did not. But all in all it mostly felt like a new generation of horror directors was more interested in being respected by the arthouse crowd than the horror community. Most likely as a backlash to the tOrTuRe PoRn that came before. Which btw was also a horror cycle that was rejected by many horror fans, despite being violent and unsettling. And before that, slasher films were all the rage again, but even that cycle didn’t go over well with a huge part of horror fans.

    You can boil it down to “We hate everything new”, but I guess it’s more like “We hate when our genre is stuck in a cliche”, which does happen every few years. I personally love THE BABADOOK (Although I do appreciate it more as mental illness drama than an actual horror film) and was intrigued by the early “Mood and weird images over anything else” pseudo-arthouse movies that came out around the same time, but I was so happy when we actually got a MALIGNANT or EVIL DEAD RISE inbetween. Something that didn’t care about being loved by “serious” critics and having its themes analyzed but instead wanted to give us 90 minutes of horror fun.

    What I’m trying to say is: In the next few years someone will make a horror movie that will kickstart another trend. Maybe it will bring back humorless hyperviolence or it will be all PG 13 with a big dose of humor. Or it’s just a return to the slasher formula of the 80s. But after two or three years of getting (mostly) nothing else, a huge part of the horror community will just roll their eyes and complain about “modern horror” again for a while.

26. 

    Miguel Hombre

    October 7th, 2026 at 6:41 am

    Along with Jim Henson’s THE CUBE I’d second George Lucas’ THX 1138 as being a grandfather to the ‘Liminal Spaces’ visual/psychological subgenre. The standard beginnings, when the movement took shape and was largely codified was a photographic exhibition in 1975 called “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape”. Writer Joan Didion also has many passages in her non-fiction works from the 1960s and 1970s that can be seen as influential. I’ve always considered Michael Manns’ MIAMI VICE (film) to be heavily influenced by the late stages of the photographic movement (so much of the film takes place within such liminal spaces – dockyards, abandoned warehouses/streets, the urban environment as disused, anonymous every-when.) I’ve also considered MIAMI VICE (film) a backdoor synthesis is William Gibson’s (cyberspace namer and NEUROMANCER/JOHNNY MNEMONIC fame) early 2000 novel Pattern Recognition. Gibson’s earliest short fiction in the 1970s has passages foregrounding a future of abandoned 1950s/60s landscape and architecture as an almost haunting reminder of past failed technology and societies. The New Topographics photographic movement focused on applying traditional photographic techniques and flourishes but directing it at the ‘new’ landscapes of urban America, both blighted and contemporary. The original conceit of New Topographics however was not necessarily doom and gloom, it was simply forcing a traditional landscape photography technique onto newer landscapes, so I will credit something like BACKROOMs for entering on the dread and uncomfortable/disturbing nature of these environments, that’s something more modern in presentation (but not necessarily original or first time.)

    I didn’t really like the film though, it definitely seems like the work of and enthusiastic amateur filmmaker who can’t seem to force very many of his ideas into something more cohesive and thoughtful (or sensible.) I guess that’s a little uncharitable, it seems more like the work of an enthusiastic 17 year old, so that’s fine. Goodness knows that I saw, participated in and helped film many ‘film’s like this when I was a teenager and in film studies classes in high school and university.

    I think the film would have been much more interesting and successful if it had dispensed with all of the ‘fantasy’ elements and simply been a creepy urban exploration of the abandoned spaces. As someone who has been participating in ‘urbanX’ for 25 years I can attest that an abandoned multi-storey 1970s hotel can be creepy as f*** late at night.

27. 

    Miguel Hombre

    October 7th, 2026 at 6:47 am

    “I think the film would have been much more interesting and successful if it had dispensed with all of the ‘fantasy’ elements and simply been a creepy urban exploration of the abandoned spaces.”

    Of course somebody already did that: Andrei Tarkovsky’s STALKER.

28. 

    Alex R

    October 7th, 2026 at 7:14 am

    Miguel– Absolutely, thank you for making the Mann connection. Miami Vice hits that, and you can even go all the way back to something like the car lot in Thief. The empty LA Metro in Collateral and the recreation of the Alex Colville painting in Heat also come to mind.

29. 

    Alex R

    October 7th, 2026 at 7:35 am

    And I also thought about Stalker, but the interesting (to me) difference here is the stalker guides people through the Zone and knows what to expect, more or less. Even if unpredictable things happen there, he’s aware enough of that unpredictability to constantly test for aberrations. In Backrooms, Async’s been exploring their weird place for who knows how long, they wear suits and left a trap and wired up cameras, but the people we explore that space with, like Chiwetel and the employees he carelessly gets to tag along, have no idea what they’re getting into. And I do really like that aspect of the film, that it’s Stalker: Origins: The Birth: First Contact for most of the characters.

30. 

    Birch

    October 7th, 2026 at 1:48 pm

    I was largely unimpressed with this and most of my thoughts have been reflected in the review or upthread, but one thing I found fascinating about Backrooms that I haven’t really seen discussed is that it is pretty explicitly anti-therapy. All modern horror has to be about metal illness, of course, but Backrooms is ultimately about a therapist who went into the field because her mother was institutionalized and her arc in the movie culminates with her giving up on a patient (who immediately is killed by a monster with his face) which allows her to escape.

    Pretty funny for a 20 year old to make a big budget horror movie based on a internet scary story and then make it about a middle aged divorced man and his therapist. Nothing I enjoy more than seeing a movie called Backrooms and then getting a scene where a man explains to his therapist that he’s been exploring the titular Backrooms, off screen. The found footage part of the movie with the running through all kinds of weird rooms with monsters in them was both my favorite part of the movie and also, you know, kind of what I expected it to be about?

31. 

    Dooley the Gravedigger

    October 7th, 2026 at 6:47 pm

    Looks like quite a few people here unhappy with what the movie did, and unhappy with what it is about, because they expected it to do different things and be about something different.

32. 

    so-and-so

    October 7th, 2026 at 7:12 pm

    @Birch you probably haven’t seen a lot of discussion about that because in the absence of further explanation it seems like a misread on your part. i don’t think the film is explicitly anti-anything beyond getting lost in weird wall portals. the filmmakers seem to recognize that therapy is best approached as a discursive process undertaken by fully willing and understanding participants, and we as viewers are free to learn from the destructive behaviors exhibited by these fictional characters. your brief summary ignores that the therapist character is still metaphorically and literally imprisoned by the film’s end.

    i was entering the home stretch of court-mandated anger therapy sessions when i saw this, and those were useful to me not only as a shared space to vent and listen to other people vent, railing against perceived slights real and imagined, but also as a way to once again retread basic psych 101 concepts including a lot of linehan’s DBT materials that i first learned about when i was diagnosed with BPD over a decade ago.

    the therapist i was speaking to individually concurrent with these classes took more of a life coach approach, and while it was helpful and very necessary to be able to engage with another black person as a peer for maybe the first time in my adult life, his advice ultimately went no further than how to assert oneself in interpersonal interactions. useful stuff, but not at all comprehensive, and when i told him i was trans he waved it aside saying that he’s had plenty of experience handling patients who are mentally ill and that it wouldn’t affect what we were already working on. the court-mandated classes were helping me. hearing that i need to be more assertive wasn’t really what i needed in that moment. i didn’t come away from this film with a newfound belief that therapy or psychoanalysis is all ineffective or evil or whatever, but instead that i need to treat it with renewed focus and find different avenues of support.

    @Alex R thank you for the kind words up above. would it be all right if i emailed you about your newsletter? i’ve been reading it for a while now and it’s been very helpful for me at many different times.

33. 

    Skani

    October 7th, 2026 at 9:17 pm

    It’s surprising to me so much discussion about the aesthetics, or the period piece, or the is-it-scary-or-not, or the found-footage part, etc., etc., etc., when it seems like the substance of it is about people getting stuck and being blinded by their own obsessions, patterns, past hurts or failures. And becoming rigid and fixated or stuck. And sort of dooming themselves by not recognizing their self-destructive patterns and hang-ups and kind of finding a bit of agency and self-awareness and personal growth. That’s pretty much the whole game for both of the two leads, and the titular rooms de back are just a metaphor for moving backwards and/or away from reality as opposed to forwards and toward reality. Or maybe someone did talk about that but I missed it. ??

    Seems laid on pretty thick that the point is that the therapist is ultimately in many respects just like the patient: stuck in the past, fixated on trying to measure up to some idealized identity and vocational status. Basically, stuck in denial, the past, and fighting against reality and losing. Ejiofor doubles down on his bullshit and just gets pulled deeper and deeper into denial and escape from reality vs. touching grass, owning his own bullshit, and finding some constructive way to move forward–the whole point of his therapy. The point was for him to move forward with his life, but his backrooms spelunking shit is the polar opposite–just moving further and further out of reality and into obsession, fantasy, and disengagement from reality. Likewise, the therapist clearly has not escaped her own past or really moved forward or drank her own Kool-Aid. She, too, is undone by self-destructive patterns, inability to let go and transcend her traumatic childhood and do the same work that she as therapist and wannabe self-help guru is urging and inviting others to do.

    So, this is a movie about people not doing the work, but instead getting lost in various forms of disengagement and escape from reality, the presnent, the here and now, and what lies ahead. “I’ll pass on that, I’m going into them backrooms, tyvm!”

    Maybe all of that is so obvious as to go without saying, but I thought it was pretty substantive and intriguing and well-done, so, I’m surprised to not find anyone commenting on it (as compared to commenting on the other things I mentioned at top of this post). Or, once again, maybe I missed it.

    I also don’t think that is a distinctly Gen Z-aged person’s problem or inner psychology. That sounds to me a lot like a middle-aged person who is stuck — that kind of person’s psychology.

    —
    More generally, I say: If you don’t like the movie, fine by me! Go on with your bad self.

    I chalk it up to there being horror sub-genres or horror adjacent dramas. I can understand a person not liking David Lynch, for example, and I would translate the associated “that’s not real horror” or “that’s not good horror” to “that’s not the kind of horror I like” or “that’s not a horror sub-genre I enjoy.”

    I also resonate with what Dooley says, which is close to what Ebert advocated for, which is ~ “evaluate the movie on its own terms and what it’s actually trying to do.” Like, at this point, if you go to watch a typical A24 or NEON joint or a Nicolas Refn movie or whatever, and you don’t like what they’re serving, that’s a “shame on me” type of situation. You know broadly what you’r signing on for. That is why I noped out of the last couple Ari Aster joints: They might have been great, and some people felt they were, but they didn’t look or sound like my cup of tea, so why subject myself to that? And if for whatever reason I ignore my instinct and do subject myself to that, why bitch about how it’s not my cup of tea? It’s not for everybody!

    In the case of BACKROOMS, I think this was pretty clearly going to be a weird-ass dream logic type movie. That was on the tin. I think it succeeded as a weird-ass dream logic, psychological horror type movie. It certainly did not deliver what a slasher film or conventional zombie film (or whatever) would deliver, because it’s not that kind of film. So, I am with Dooley on that.

    OBSESSION is one that I think can play as a complicated deconstruction of Gen z angst, shitty dating/relationship type behavior (or #metoo stuff, shitty men stuff, etc.), etc., etc., but I think it also works as a prestige TALES FROM THE CRYPT episode. So, I don’t really see what’s not to like or what’s to complain about there. It’s a pretty gnarly, fucked up, Monkey’s Paw type TALES episode, and if you want to tease apart the generational and gendered subtext, that’s there, too, if you want to go there, but it still works just at the level of “that was a really fucked up, be careful what you wish for-type TALES FROM THE CRYPT joint.”

34. 

    Curt

    October 8th, 2026 at 4:06 am

    Miguel, I absolutely agree about THX 1138 being another example of this type of modernist horror. And it goes without saying that Kubrick’s THE SHINING is an ancestor of not only A24 elevated horror but of the newly christened liminal horror – the idea that there’s something eerie and malignant about communal spaces being empty.

    Star Trek, Doctor Who and Farscape each did episodes in which the ship’s familiar hallways suddenly become a surreal distorted nightmare, and I always liked those episodes. Before any of those there was a Twilight Zone episode about people finding themselves in a blank environment and trying to find a way out.

    I think this type of horror has existed for as long as people have had to live and work in bland, brightly lit institutional environments. It feels like an especially 1960s/1970s aesthetic, maybe because modernist / Brutalist architecture was still new then, and people were dealing with the fact that environments designed to seem clean and futuristic and utopian ended up feeling cold and impersonal and dysfunctional.

    This issue seemed to come up not just with corporate environments but also with residential projects. Pruitt–Igoe was an infamous housing project that became dystopian and crime-ridden – I know about this mainly because the famous montage film KOYAANISQATSI used footage of its demolition, and one of the tracks on the Philip Glass soundtrack was named after it.

    I know that tower blocks in England have had similar issues – the J.G. Ballard novel HIGH RISE (made into a movie a few years ago) was about one of those environments going crazy, and Ballard’s other sci-fi stories got a lot of mileage out of futuristic utopian structures becoming eerie relics. ATTACK THE BLOCK takes place in that type of environment, and did not seem like the kind of place I’d want to come home to after hours.

    So I don’t see this as some newfangled Gen Z thing. If it is, then M.C. Escher was Gen Z a century ago, and so was Edward Hopper when he painted the liminal horror classic “Nighthawks” in 1942.

    If anything, this type of horror is at least as old as post-Romero zombie movies and post-Ed Gein slashers – these were once such a shockingly radical break away from the cobwebby Gothic style of horror movies up to that point, but are now pretty much synonymous with “horror movie”.

    I’m nostalgic for particular genres, subgenres and franchises like anybody. But I’m also nostalgic for the 1990s era of breakthrough indie films by precocious young directors. So to me it *is* the good old days when a new director under 30 has a sleeper hit.

    For all these reasons, BACKROOMS didn’t seem that jarringly new to me. It was like reuniting with an old friend. (“I like it in here…” – sob)

35. 

    Alex R

    October 8th, 2026 at 7:01 am

    so-and-so– Please do! Would love to talk about whatever. I’m glad it’s been of any use to anybody. I don’t even remember to include the URL here half the time.

    Birch– In addition to what so-and-so wrote, I don’t think it’s anti-therapy because the therapist doesn’t give up on her client. She worries about his safety enough to go to his workplace and check on him (arguably crossing a boundary) and then runs away only after he’s choked her out, dragged her further into hell, started eating semi-people, etc. Therapists don’t have blood oaths to save you from self-destruction, they’re just people you regularly meet with, who try to help, and sometimes they fail, and they have their own therapists because they make as many mistakes as anybody, etc. I don’t think the movie is saying she’s doing a great, empathetic job working with her client, either, just that that client is so set in his obsessions and being right/in control that he’s going to stay lost in there forever.

36. 

    Birch

    October 9th, 2026 at 4:22 am

    Therapists don’t have a blood oath, no, but they are vested with legal, institutional, and social power over their clients and are held to legal, professional, and ethical standards. If the film was about Mary the night shift manager at a municipal wastewater treatment plant whose relationship with Clark was not professional in nature and she told him, ‘Clark, I can not continue to feel responsible for your self destructive behavior. I already carry around a physical token of the guilt I feel over my mom’s own mental health crisis and I’d like to stop doing that as well,’ I’d think ‘You can’t save everyone/you can be responsible for other people’s mental health is a tough learn but this work does thematically resonate with my own life, having been on both sides of that equation.’ Instead what we have is a film about the relationship between a patient and a therapist who believes in the project of talk therapy so hard that she’s some kind of celebrity therapist who sells cassette tapes, and, in the climax of the movie her patient point blank asks her ‘how do I get better?’ and she responds not with, ‘Let’s try a different therapist/different style of therapy/ect’ but with ‘I don’t know.’ at which point her patient dies by literally being consumed by the embodiment of his trauma and she metaphorically overcomes her own trauma not through talk therapy but by admitting that she doesn’t believe therapy can save everyone and then beating the literal weight of her trauma that she carries with her against a flesh pinata of her former client. As there are no other positive representations of talk therapy in the film, I think it is a pretty straightforward reading of the text to conclude that it’s at best skeptical of talk therapy as a solution to trauma.

    @so-and-so I know therapy is a sensitive subject for a lot of people but I want to be clear that my reading of the film is not a referendum on therapy as a concept or even a reflection of my own feelings about therapy (I am generally pro-therapy fwiw). My first instinct was to write something snippy about Mary ending the movie being held captive by the paramilitary arm of a rouge MRI company (a delightful sentence to write, if I’m being honest) not seeming relevant to the film’s themes regarding therapy but, on further reflection, I don’t think that’s entirely true. There’s a trend in speculative fiction in the past 20 years or so that probably has a name although I don’t know it, perhaps best embodied in the Southern Reach books, of stories in which an institution is put in charge of managing some kind of crisis or phenomena but is institutionally unsuited for understanding it, let alone solving or managing it. Backrooms is kind of like a Hidden Fortress take on the concept, where the former MRI company’s almost comically inappropriate response to discovering the backrooms (sending in people to die setting up listening posts, CCTV systems, and tape players playing random snippets of speech) appears at the periphery of the story while we follow characters who are bumbling around on their own. Mary, as a stand in for the institution of psychology, complete with her own cassette tapes even, finds herself insufficient to solve either her or Clark’s problem, and the ending is a role reversal, with Mary finding herself at the mercy of a institution incapable of achieving what it seeks to achieve.

    I was trying to work in a reference to the terrible band Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! but I never really found an appropriate place.

37. 

    so-and-so

    October 9th, 2026 at 5:41 am

    i took it for granted that the filmmakers know that we know that people are human and don’t necessarily have all the right answers for everyone

38. 

    Alex R

    October 9th, 2026 at 7:48 am

    I think it’s fair to call Renate’s brick a physical totem of her trauma, but I disagree with a few things here. I’m not listing these to aggressively be like “Here’s all the reasons you’re WRONG,” I’m listing them because they’re different points and I don’t want to lose track of them.
    – I don’t think she’s supposed to be a celebrity therapist as much as she’s trying to be one, in the same way he made the TV ad to become/seem like the owner of a successful furniture store. It’s what they’re presenting themselves as.
    – By that same token, I don’t think Pirate Monster Chiwetel is a metaphor for his trauma. Person Chiwetel spends so much of the movie yelling about how he feels that an external metaphor would be redundant. I think it’s just what the backrooms saw when it observed Chiwetel, it’s the explosive anger he thinks he’s hiding (or thinks he doesn’t have) but that everybody else can see.
    – The movie’s pretty lean, plot-wise, and there isn’t room for more positive representations of talk therapy just like there aren’t more positive representations of retail managers or MRI engineers.
    – When Pirate Monster Chiwetel appears, there’s nothing Renate could do but run and eventually fight back it corners her. She’s faced with an 8-foot-tall pirate that looks like her client, sure, but also the guy who just assaulted her and scalped a pseudo-person a few minutes ago. If the movie wanted to follow the metaphor you’re describing, it could have set up a different scenario, but in that moment, she can’t try another form of therapy or call for support or anything. But also again, if it was a metaphor for the way she helps a person with their trauma, I wouldn’t expect her to let herself be eaten or to pull her client away in the short time between him saying “it’s okay” and the monster biting his head off.

39. 

    Birch

    October 10th, 2026 at 4:08 am

    I think we’re having two different conversations, to be honest with you. Much in the way that I don’t think the movie has anything to say about therapists as individuals (Mary is not a villain, by any means) but it does have things to say about therapy as both a practice and an institution, yeah, I do think it has something to say about retail, as explored through Clark, and corporations, as explored through popcorn man. Owning a retail store instead of living his dream contributed to Clark’s alcoholism and the dissolution of his marriage, and created a psychic wound so potent that it tore a hole in reality. Clark would rather live between the walls of reality like a cockroach than be a retail manager, so yes, I do think that, in the absence of any positive representation of the retail industry, it is correct to surmise the movie has a negative view of it. Likewise, the depiction of a corporation that has discovered a new fronter and jealously guards this knowledge it while attempting to exploit it, at the cost of human life, and operates under the belief that the limitless potential of said frontier entitles them to powers that are traditionally the domain of the state (such as keeping therapists captive under armed guard), in the absence of a depiction of a powerful corporation that is ethical, a good neighbor to their local community, and a good environmental steward (or whatever the fuck positive corporate representation looks like), does naturally lead to a conclusion about how the film feels about corporate power.

40. 

    so-and-so

    October 10th, 2026 at 4:45 pm

    so that would be implicit, not explicit

41. 

    Skani

    October 10th, 2026 at 8:14 pm

    As I suggested previously, I saw it saying more about denial and illusion vs. self-awareness and moving forward. It’s about people who are stuck and can’t move forward. To me, it wasn’t even anti-retail, it was more about the stress this guy was under and his disillusionment with how his life turned out vs. how he wanted it to turn out (and him blaming others for how it turned out). Chronic stress and discouragement giving way to isolation and disillusionment and then just becoming detached from any kind of family or social network, alone with your thoughts, just rehearsing and ruminating over your story about the raw deal life gave you.

    I don’t really get the logic of saying that this movie is making some kind of negative statement about extremely general institutions (therapy, corporations, retail) just in virtue particular negative events or associations in the movie. To me that would be like saying Eijiofor’s character is some general negative comment on Black men or that the movie is anti-pirate or something. I can’t see it. In general, see the movie as more interior and psychological. I don’t see it doing general social commentary, except perhaps in the very broad sense of commenting on the anomie and loneliness of modern suburbia, workaholism, and having your identity wrapped up in career achievements or financial success or whatever. But, again, I think those sorts of issues are more just the context for delving into more fundamental psychological stuff–obsession, self-destructive patterns, and the like.

42. 

    Muh

    October 15th, 2026 at 10:39 am

    Between this and Obsession, I think this was way more interesting. The chase at the end was fantastic, good character stuff, and it’s just a cool concept.