Coming soon, 7 Juni 2026

Seen at a screening of Backrooms at Flix Brewhouse.

I enjoyed Backrooms quite a bit and intend to watch the web series it is based upon. No doubt it has led to the word "liminal" being added to the vocabularies of millions who missed Exit 8.

The movie's strength was the mystery of the backrooms and all the unheimlichy goodness therein. But I suppose it needed some kind of plot, some kind of hook so that it didn't go too far down the path of Inland Empire obscurity. And so we open with scenes demonstrating that scientists are investigating the titular spaces before we are introduced to Clark, who runs a furniture store, the basement of which has a door to the backrooms. Clark also has a failing marriage but a good relationship with the bottle, the latter much to the chagrin of his therapist.

Clark investigates the backrooms and lures a couple of his employees into helping him. As you can imagine, things go wrong and Clark descends into madness. His therapist, Mary, investigates and discovers the backrooms. She eventually finds her patient and learns that, while he may have been right about the seemingly impossible liminal space he rambled on about in his therapy sessions, he has also lost touch with reality, however weird it truly is. There's a hideously perverted Alice in Wonderland tea party type of scene in which we come to understand that Clark has completely lost it and we also learn the identity of the monster we've only heard and seen brief glimpses of until now.

Mary eventually escapes and is captured by researchers from the Async Research Institute. In a Lovecraftian type of scene ("The Statement of Mary Kline"?), Mary is seated across a table from an Async scientist who offers her some modest explanations to complement her own experiences.

The whole Async angle seemed superfluous to me. It broke the spell a bit. People wandering the (non-Euclidian?) backrooms was spooky and unnerving, their madness when confronted with such an enigma understandable. Clark's explanation of the space as a faulty copy of reality was enough. Knowing that experts are on the case takes the edge off things. Now, if, like in the Southern Reach series, the Async investigations had all ended horribly, that would preserve the mystery, maintain the enigma for me. But their investigations seem to be far-reaching and ongoing.

Still, it should be said that Backrooms kept most of the mystery alive. It, thankfully, didn't have the Async boffin offer a thorough explanation. Creepy, uncanny, some potential non-Euclidian geometry, and descent into madness when confronted with the unknowable, Backrooms has all the trappings of a Lovecraftian tale - it just moves the setting from early 20th century New England to 1990s suburbia.

 

 

 

 

Coming soon, 18 April 2026

I took a day off after going to the movies 11 days in a row. These were seen at a screening of The Drama.

On the face of it, The Drama isn't something I'd watch whether it be at the cinema or at home. But I enjoyed director Kristoffer Borgli's previous flick, the surreal Dream Scenario, and heard good things (ahem) about the movie's sound design.

Stylistically The Drama is quite interesting, at times. Emma, played by Zendaya, is deaf in one ear and the movie provides different ambient sounds depending on whether a shot is from her point of view or her beau Charlie's. However, this motif is abandoned at some point and I am unsure why. Or largely abandoned as it seems the flashbacks to Emma's youth usually have a static in the background that reminded me of the run off groove of a record and they do until the end, if memory serves.

Emma's semi-deafness is played for laughs in the opening scene, used in a tender moment in another, and given an explanation that relates to her horrific revelation given one drunken night during a session of Tell Us the Worst Thing You Ever Did. In the main though, it is ignored and she can hear just fine otherwise, even quite well through a door in one scene when she is brooding in a bathroom and overhears a conversation outside the door.

Flashbacks, dreams, and inner visions are fairly prominent although they seemed to be used less frequently as the movie went on. For instance, the morning after the big revelation, Emma wakes up to find Charlie gone. We then to cut to a shot of him with his best friend Mike in a park. Mike is telling his friend that he can in no way marry Emma and that he'll do whatever it takes to prevent it and cover for him. Charlie returns to the home he shares with Emma and we get the impression that the scene was a doomsday scenario that played out only in Emma's head.

I think Borgli is trying to comment here on the roles of stories in our lives, how they affect us, add meaning, and allow us to assemble the events that make up our existence into what we call a life. But I'd need to watch the movie again to try and make connections between this theme and the stylistic elements the director employs.

Not sure I want to do that, though, as I found Charlie to be a thoroughly unlikable character. He is just so pathetic that it was painful for me to watch. When the couple fired their wedding DJ, she called Emma a bitch (I think) and Charlie a pussy and she had him dead to rights. He is obviously older than Emma yet is bumbling and came across as being quite immature. In many instances he stumbles through conversations and is often paralyzed by indecision. Perhaps this was to make the feel-good ending feel good.

Emma is a very sympathetic character and I found her transformation from someone who just wants to crawl under a rock after her drunken revelation to being a woman prone to fits of intense anger to be realistic. I empathized with her. It's just too bad she threw her lot in with a man-child.

Onto the trailers!

The first couple were commericals with no MPAA thingy.

I cannot recall the last time I saw 2 comic book movie trailers at a screening. The first was Spider-Man.

Now this one looked good with its House of Leaves vibe.

Is this the new Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice? A red band trailer.