My major backrooms movie misinterpretation that might lead to interesting thoughts about alternative plots and stories for the backrooms. Spoilers! Also please do not make comments about how you can't possibly understand how someone could misinterpret things so badly. If I knew why beyond my reasons stated below I'd say that.
So, first of all, I thought the child and mother shown throughout the movie was Mary and her child. The child was outright named as Mary and the therapist's name was Mary, but I'm not a person who picks up character's names without subtitles. If there's no subtitles I will not know people's names unless it's said multiple times (like Clark and Kat, the only two characters whose names I actually fully recognized and remembered. The rest I got from reading reviews and connecting the action of the character described to the name). I was confused as to where Mary's child went and why she seemed so unbothered, but I chalked it up to her becoming a therapist specifically to help with her processing the loss.
When we see more flashbacks I thought this was the present with Mary's child and her new caretaker who are trapped in the backrooms, concluded from the strange chair stack and how insistent the caretaker was about the child not looking or going outside, as it's obviously dangerous with hostile entities lurking around. At this point I concluded that Mary's child noclipped into the backrooms and had been surviving there, adopted by this person in the same situation as her.
During the scene of the room transforming, I thought it was how the room was being remembered and misremebered by the backrooms until it forgot it entirely and it defaulted back to the familiar office space. When the child and caretaker are in the hospital I thought it was Async that had found them and taken them away because they'd seen and experienced too much, hospitalizing them to convince them they were just crazy and sick.
Within the context of the rest of the movie, this misunderstanding falls apart in terms of making sense at most by the hospital scene because if they were showing that people were in there and surviving it'd make no sense to remove them before Mary ever finds them, but obviously depending on who you are it falls apart earlier in your head or you never make this mistake in the first place because you don't mistake two white women for each other (the entire time I was thinking Mary looked eerily similar to a white woman I know irl).
It would be interesting to explore how someone goes about survive for long periods of time in the backrooms alone and how they interact with people after so long in survival mode. We do get both of these somewhat in the movie, but Clark never explains what the liquid they're drinking is and where it comes from, and Pirate Clark is the only hostile entity we see so the only person we see surviving for an extended period of time independently was someone not threatened by the monster that exists to kill him.
Also obviously if you go through the movie with this misinterpretation and when it falls apart you can't reconnect it to the right idea, it makes Mary seem so bland. I'm glad I read reviews after seeing the movie because I definitely would've gone on with my life thinking those kid scenes were so weird and it was weird that Mary was just a therapist. It retroactively makes me love her more and helps me appreciate the symbolism within the concrete handprint and understand why she chooses to snap at Clark like she does.
Again, please no negative or insulting comments about how I understood the movie so badly, I gave you every reason I thought contributed to it but neurodivergence does what it wants.