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koberulz.bsky.social · @koberulz.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated Backrooms 3/10

Got to watch this next to an elderly couple who alternated between loud snoring and loud conversations about trying to make sense of the film. They were particularly thrown by the time-travel element. There was no time travel element. I've been vaguely aware of this film for a while now, as it's obviously doing quite well out of absolutely nowhere and there's been plenty of discussion about it online. Much of it has been about how soaked in the internet the film and its director are, but I couldn't see where that argument came from when watching the film. It seemed to me like a fairly standard horror film that could have come from any era. Having sat with it for a week, reading nothing further about it, I started to see somewhat of a “Welcome to the Internet” attitude to the way it presented the eponymous locale and its effects on those who come into contact with it. Even escape isn't really much of an escape, it seems. Then doing some reading today, it turns out the film is based on a webseries that was in turn based on a 4chan creepypasta. So my read may have absolutely nothing to do with what everyone's been talking about. I'm young enough to have grown up with the internet, but I never hung out on 4chan and frankly find a lot of internet culture—even from those of my generation—foreign. So it's certainly possible I'm also just missing a lot of what this is going for. The major question it presents—as with Obsession, which I watched immediately after this—is just who the actual protagonist is. It starts out looking like it's Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Secret in Their Eyes), a divorced depressed furniture salesman living in his showroom and with so few customers that the store being open or closed at any given time seems entirely arbitrary. His therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World) seems to take over in the second half, but it seems more like a case of indecision as to which of the characters to commit to. The arcs of the two characters are so thoroughly distinct that it becomes an entirely different film if you associate more with one than the other. Its playing of the middle left me not really connecting with either. On the subject of similarities with Obsession, interesting to see both films get Milkshake Ducked a week or so apart, in this case with studio A24 signing a deal with Google to throw AI garbage into its future films.

#movie

Published 2026-06-23 00:00 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere