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Notes -
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.
You've almost piqued my interest enough to watch the film. Almost.
My life improved immeasurably once I genuinely stopped giving a shit what this type of person thought about me. It concerns me now about as much as I am concerned by the fact that no herd of American bison will ever love me.
Bisons are majestic thought.
Fair point. I guess being loved by a herd of bison could indeed help the soul and I shouldn't have been so dismissive about them. My point still stands about educated professional white women.
Would you rather be alone in the woods with a herd of American bison or an educated professional white woman?
Depends, am I at a safe distance from both? Othwise it's picking my poison of physical damage vs professional/psychiatric damage.
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