54/100
Here's an environment. Do you like my environment? Immerse yourself in the environment I offer you. That is all.
Some of you will recognize that as my Twitter reaction to Brillante Mendoza's Serbis at NYFF 2008. (Whatever happened to Mendoza? Looks like he's still churning 'em out prolifically; the fests I follow just aren't biting anymore.) But it's equally applicable to Backrooms' initial hour and change, which I'd feel more confident about likening to a video-game walkthrough had I played a video game more recently than the mid-'80s. That's definitely what it feels like: moving your avatar (let's make him resemble Chiwetel Ejiofor) from room to room, investigating the odd collection of objects in each; any sense of a goal is missing, but my impression is that video games have been gradually divesting themselves of goal-oriented play, encouraging players to just sort of hang out in some imaginatively detailed alternate world. This particular world's meant to be eerie and discomfiting, which wasn't really the case for me—I'm more annoyed than spooked by yellowish fluorescent lighting, not remotely unnerved by simple nondescript unused office space (i.e. the original photo that sparked this phenomenon, which is a big ol' "And this is interesting because...?" from my perspective). The weirder stuff's variable: bit of creepiness in shoes partly sunken into the carpet, and the standee that seems to be cycling through every human language (why not wait for English, Chewy?) intrigued me, but I shrugged at all the stacked chairs and laundry piles.
As someone noted, Backrooms, though reportedly shot in Canada somewhere, ostensibly takes place where I was born and raised. Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire is located at Capitol and McKee, an actual intersection in San Jose that I've driven past a zillion times (albeit not recently; used to be strip malls there); all of the action takes place between mid-June and early July of 1990, and here's where I was living then, relative to the store.
That doesn't really give me any special insight, especially since none of Backrooms was actually shot in San Jose. What kinda does, though, is San Jose's primary tourist attraction, the Winchester Mystery House. Which is located in a different part of town (actually right next to the former movie-theater chain at which I saw every studio picture throughout the '70s and '80s), and bears virtually no aesthetic resemblance to this film's labyrinth of bland "liminal spaces." (You keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means.) Can't get much further from the backrooms than an ornately designed and furnished Victorian-style mansion. But locals circulate fanciful stories, inspired by the house's lengthy construction (variously said to span from 22 to 38 years), about Sarah Winchester having been told by a medium that she'd be protected from the ghosts of people killed by Winchester rifles so long as that house remained in the process of actively being built. Tour the house (preferably via flashlight at midnight) and you'll be shown numerous architectural eccentricities: stairs that lead directly into the ceiling, doors that open on walls or second-floor thin air, so forth. There are of course mundane explanations for all these features, but over many years they spawned increasingly outré speculation that gradually evolved into lore, and Backrooms seems very much like the culmination(-to-date) of a similar, far speedier online version of that process.
Fashioning a satisfying quasi-narrative film from what's really just atmospheric what-if? represents a significant challenge, though, and I don't feel as if screenwriter Will Soodik (who previously wrote a S4 Westworld episode, and boy that does make sense) quite cracked it. Bold move to make Clark so unlikable, depicting him as a warped, frustrated man whose damaged psyche implicitly influences the paranormal adjunct to his store. And I admire how truly weird the film eventually gets, prompting such better-unanswered questions as "How exactly did Clark discover that the AI-ish duplicate zombie humans in there are edible?" That's psychological grist a-plenty, and I for one neither required nor desired more in the form of Clark's therapist having her own traumatic childhood backstory (coincidentally somewhat similar to The Currents' one overly explanatory aspect, which is all that's keeping Mumenthaler's otherwise superb film off my best-of-the-century list*), which mostly just gets in the way of her serving as our identification figure during Backrooms' second half. Parsons apparently directed Reinsve to be fairly zombie-like herself, typically maddening in sessions with Clark (as befits the cultural stereotype) but also weirdly blank at other times, as if she's the shell of a human even before walking through Cap'n Clark's basement wall; if this is meant to suggest the backrooms' anomie leaking into the greater world, having her kidnapped by an insane Clark and then pursued by a giant half-remembered carnivorous version of his TV-commercial character kinda undermines that, does it not?
(Speaking of which, I had not expected to be twice reminded of Ghostbusters by this film. First view of the backrooms immediately made me think, in Bill Murray's sardonic voice, "You're right, no human being would stack chairs like this," and then there's clearly a Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man quality to the movie's deliberately goofy climactic threat. Don't imagine that was intentional, but it amused me nonetheless.)
All in all, more ambitious and thoughtful than I expected, but it inevitably betrays its origin as something-other-than-cinema. We keep hearing that movies are terminally ill, spurned by Gen Alpha and their microscopic attention spans, soon to be supplanted...and yet everything—literature, television, video games, comic books, viral videos, amusement park rides, freakin' Twitter threads—still wants to be a movie! Greatly exaggerated.
* This plug brought to you by my concern that NYC cinephiles who run out to catch everything of note do not appear to be seeing The Currents at Lincoln Center, after having skipped its NYFF press screening last year. And why are certain newsletters I subscribe to reviewing, say, Rose of Nevada but ignoring The Currents? I realize Milagros Mumenthaler isn't yet a "name," but guys, this is one of the year's major films. Trust me.