Backrooms is a movie based on someone finding a photograph disquieting. It’s not the greatest film, but it promises you the movie of a creepypasta, and it delivers on that.
The movie is about the atmosphere, not the plot. The soundtrack is perfect for the job. Nothing is the right amount of thing to be happening.
The plot’s a bit thin and feels pasted on — it’s a distraction from the atmosphere. The characters are characters, they’re perfectly fine characters to put into a script. But they feel pasted on too. The trailer makes the movie seem like it’ll be more plot-driven than it is or should be. The main character slowly losing it is good, but it’s the only story action. The story only gets properly weird at the end — this should have come in much earlier.
There’s a bit of gore — the movie earns that 15 rating. It doesn’t really advance things though? It’s the plot trying to get you to pay attention to it again. The dead seagull on the floor is more distressing, because it fits the atmosphere.
13 out of 10 for setting Backrooms in 1990. I remember 1990 and this is an accurate rendition. 1988 to 1990 was neither eighties nor nineties. An absolutely liminal time. VHS found footage as an era.
The kid (who dragged me out to see it) liked Backrooms more than I did. I asked if they’d recommend it to others, and they paused for a moment and said, only if you enjoy this sort of thing.
I didn’t mind spending two hours of my life on this film and it was reasonably entertaining — also cheap, a Monday midday showing for £5 each.
We both saw the promise in the idea of Backrooms and now we both want to watch the YouTube series that came between the creepypasta and the movie. I might even get around to it.
I guess A24 won’t cough 10M to let a young unexperienced director do mood pieces on empty corridors for 90 mins, so they got one or two experienced writers to shape it into a “movie”. But the minimal script is useful enough to give you some non hints and non explanations. There’s no “character arc”, but the suggestion that enough subconscious turbulence will shape the mistery place. But also that it’s impossible to understand, even less to control or predict.
Kind of a good metaphore for what makes a viral hit movie, now that I think of it… ¿Is the evil corporation a metaphore for current Hollywood? ¿Spending a lot of money and losing people to weird accidents, in search for the magic formula that makes them rich again?
Probably not. It’s clearly a cautionary tale about not pirating music.