Backrooms
Review: Okay let me just start by saying, if you’re unfamiliar with the idea of ‘Backrooms’ this is unfortunately not the place for you to learn about them. I was trying to explain the whole idea of the Backrooms and the plot of this film to my mom a few minutes before writing this and think I failed miserably. Unlike most people my age, I have zero prior experience with the Backrooms. I had never heard of them until I saw a post saying A24 had hired an 18-year old director to direct a movie based on a YouTube web series. So all that to say I had no expectations for this film. And I did enjoy it quite a bit. The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve as a furniture store owner and his therapist. Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Robert Bobroczkyi also appear in supporting roles. I’d say all the performances are solid to good. Ejiofor’s was the best and Reinsve’s was very good, though I feel like her accent was hit or miss. I think it would have been fine for her to just have her normal accent. Overall it’s a solid film though that’s not too scary, but extremely unnerving. I also liked the switching camera shots from a standard POV to a found footage style, they both complimented the moments well.
High: The production design on this film was something else. You can tell it was all done practically and it 100% deserves an Oscar nomination for Best Production Design. It really, really helped set eeriness. Between that, the lighting, the score, and the cinematography, you are set up to be unsettled. Mission accomplished.
Low: The ending felt misguided. I won’t spoil it, but I’ll say this. It felt like they were both trying to balance an ambiguous, spooky ending while also trying to keep the door open for future installments. The spooky ending feels more like the choice of director, Kane Parsons, and writer, Will Soodik, while keeping the door open feels painfully like a studio decision. The ending held things back just a tad.
Rating: 7.5/10, could potentially move up to an 8/10 because I’ve been thinking pretty hard about the movie since watching it.
