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Kino Review: Backrooms
Spoiler warning obviously.
Backrooms the movie is superficially based on the 4chan meme “the backrooms”, and yes, there are lots of fun found-footage scenes visually exploring the aesthetics of liminal spaces, but good horror movies are never about the monster, they are about what the monster represents. Backrooms is about the fear that no educated professional white woman will ever love you.
Male Lead is a black entrepreneur who runs a local furniture store. Female Lead is his upstanding attractive white PhD therapist. Male Lead is in therapy primarily because his financially dependent law student wife (who is also an attractive white woman) left him.
It is hinted that Female Lead is also lonely and wants children. From a purely narrative perspective, it might seem as if Male Lead and Female Lead are destined to get together at some point. Taking into account their respective biographies, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA of course that wouldn’t happen. He is a schlubby loser from a lower social class and an unprestigious career. You can practically taste the ick she feels behind the professional facade in every scene they have together. It's great.
The twist is that Male Lead is the monster, and the climax is his grotesquely personified id rapaciously chasing Female Lead through a hellscape maze of his own creation. A surface-level analysis might fault the film for once again portraying male sexual frustration in a negative light, and yeah, that element is certainly there, but film (at least indie film) like all modern art is meant to challenge the viewer. On some level, one ought to reflect on how much of a monster one becomes on the inside when Stacy rejects you. I think the film earns it.
I just watched it. I'm a fan of all the Kane Parsons YouTube series, and have spent time on the Backrooms fan community wiki. I prefer Parsons' universe as its more consistent with its lore.
I thought it was good. 7-8/10. Mainly because I like the lore and got more out of it than your average normie.
I like how the lore was expanded and it puts past renditions of 'monsters' into hi-res context, which is great. The universe is more or less fleshed out now in detail, so if this movie does well commercially we might get more.
This is a very valid interpretation of the film. My theory is that the 'copies' of people are influenced by the mental integrity of the person copied. Clearly Clark was mentally unstable due to alcoholism, his external locus of control, his suppressed anger at his ex-wife, not helped by his undisclosed (nonlinear?) time stuck in the backrooms alone.
As usual with Backrooms, I love that they have normies enter the place and do normie things, which is kind of part of the setting. I don't get how the 'other organisation' is still so unprepared, incompetent and shit scared at going in there, but I guess they're like MRI technicians or something and completely unprepared to that environment.
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