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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'm reminded of a Spongebob meme I saw a while ago, a comic made up of screenshots where, IIRC, Spongebob is ordering from Squidward, with alternating frames, saying, "In my medieval fantasy story, it turns out that the church is actually evil," "How original," "And the demons are actually the good guys!" "Daring, are we?" It's quite possible and even likely that there's some valuable insight and even challenge there, but this is such well-trod ground that comports with the general thrust of basically all media in the mainstream that this description, in itself, makes it sound boring, if not tiresome. That said, it all comes down to the execution, of course.
I used to have fun asking people if they could think of a few examples of evil priests in fiction. No problem of course; there are many. Then I'd ask if they could think of any non-evil priests in fiction. Crickets.
Over the years a couple of examples have come up, of course, but mainly it's a landslide in the other direction. Particularly for anyone who mainly consumes contemporary media as opposed to reading Chesterton or something.
Zadok is the obvious example. Father Ted and Co. as well, although I accept there is scope for disagreement here.
So we have:
There is also Father Dougal, who can't be called evil only by virtue of being too stupid to understand the consequences of his actions.
I genuinely can't think of a single sympathetically portrayed priest in the show.
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