This is basically a copy and paste yap session about the backrooms movie I had on discord and I wanted to post it on tumblr too because I think people gotta know how much I liked this movie as someone who is kind of snobbish about liminal spaces and the backrooms. It's really long so beware.
Most of the spoilers are under the cut
Ok so I shouldn't have gone into this movie with low expectations because I already knew that Kane Parsons actually understands the backrooms and the liminality of it, and based on the plot and characters of the movie, he obviously understands it on the psychological level and what the backrooms and liminal spaces in general represent on a mental scale.
So in my opinion thank GOD it was him to be the one directing a backrooms movie and nobody else like some big film company because I truly believe they wouldn't have captured it the same way he did.
First of all, the cinematography was great. Like 'I wanna get a dvd release of this NOW so I can take screencaps of it' great. There were multiple shots, even outside the backrooms, that were shot in such a liminal way, like the stereotypical liminal space image. And that's really silly and stuff but it worked so good to put you on edge the whole time and immerse you in the movie's vibe. Because it gave you this scale of how the rest of the movie would be shot. So many good scenes are just widescale frames with a main character walking in the distance, and I think that distance makes it more liminal in nature. Because obviously liminality invloves the absence of people, so they end up feeling out of place anyway.
They had a saying in the film. "Like describing a dog to someone who's never seen a dog and asking them to draw it." This in my opinion perfectly encapsulates how I see liminality and the actual horror of it. It's so close to what's normal and human, and yet not quite right. That's how this entire movie feels and it's WONDERFUL. I want to specifically point out a scene towards the start of the movie, when Clark first discovers the doorway to the backrooms. Seeing him change his perspective over and over as he catches this sliver of light in the wall made me so giddy, it was just a beautiful way to show his curiosity and confusion, rather than dropping him into a new setting and having immediate panic. More of that in liminal space media!!!
Speaking of characters, they were some of the best, most straightforward and best fitting characters for the film they were in. I thought that they would be dry and just have some backstory written that would explain them being there, but no, they were genuinely written into the movie as two separate archetypes opposing each other, their personalities and their backstories were the driving force of what made the backrooms an actual psychological horror and not just a spooky place. Because that's what they're meant to be!!! It all perfectly encapsulated the feeling of isolation not just in the setting, but in the characters because they themselves were already struggling with really heavy shit.
Clark was such a good protagonist with great writing and internal struggles, and Mary's flashback scenes throughout the movie to tell the audience that she herself was also going through her own version of "staying in one place" was wonderful and gave two characters with similar problems, two distinct ways of dealing with it. One is internal and focused on himself and who he is beyond someone fitting into a patriarchal box and the autonomy of others, one is more external and focused on those around her and what it means when she's meant to help others when she can't even help herself.
Clark struggling with his own emotional regulation and understanding when to admit he's at fault. The movie starts with him explaining why his wife left him from his own perspective and that was not lost on me. We get no context for what actually happened and why she kicked him out of the house, but we know how he feels about it and how that takes precedence over his wife's feelings. He's self entitled and grasping at any kind of control he can get out of his situations. You see that in the way he maps out the backrooms and really wants Mary to understand that he isn't making it up. He wants to understand it, he doesn't want it to just be a mystery. He starts out with going to therapy and trying to be better as a person, wanting a grasp on it in a way that isn't harmful to those around him. But by the end of the movie, he's become so comfortable in the way he is and how he engages with others and the world around him, he just wants to stay the way he is, and stay in the backrooms where he says he's truly free.
And this is all because the point of the movie was about looking back at the past and wanting to go back to a time. Or at least putting yourself in that moment and not leaving. At first I didn't like that Clark died and Mary didn't, I thought it was a little unfair. But now I understand why it was like that for plot and theme relevency. Clark is basically eaten by a monstrous version of himself, the version of himself he portrays on tv for his furniture business. He gets up in excitement to face this version of himself and says "It's ok! She says we don't have to change!" literally saying that they are one and the same, saying that this version of himself that is killing and eating people, is part of him and that he doesn't want to let go of it, he's comfortable in his own struggle with his mental health and it's literally eating away at his mental state, to the point that he makes bad decisions for himself and those around him.
Also he literally eats the "made up" versions of people in the backrooms. He says it's ok because they don't feel anything. He acknowledges that somewhere there's people that are the real versions of them, but these are not those and are therefore fine to eat and take advantage of, taking his own autonomy into account over their own, seeing a different kind of person than he is. However, he kills Kat, his assistant for filming and it's undetermined if he eats her but he at least killed her and put her head in his fridge. He said it's because she wasn't willing to accept the place they were in, she opposed him and so he killed her. I think her not wanting to stay in the physical backrooms was similar to her saying she didn't want to be near Clark anymore, at least that's my interpretation.
Also little sidenote, Mary's reaction to Clark stabbing and eating the people from the backrooms as opposed to her reaction to seeing Kat's head was really good. Yes she was shocked at him stabbing the backroom's remembered man, but she was truly horrified seeing Kat's head. She immediately knew she was a real person, not something made by the backrooms, showing the difference between the real organic look of humans and the artificial look of the remembered people.
Mary is actually similar to Clark in a way I think. She was the daughter of a mother who I believe had a form of Alzheimer's or other kind of dementia. She was trapped in her house and wasn't ever allowed to leave until they were forced out by the city building new skyscrapers (At least I hope that was what was happening because her flashback scenes were not very literal and more symbolized which is COOL because that was the whole point of her character). So she doesn't know anything but the inside of her house for like the first 7 years of her life until she's suddenly forced out of it when her mother is hospitalized for her disease. She looks back at her childhood with nostalgia, having her view of it progressively less literal and more of a symbolic event for her to eventually become a therapist. Which btw, I love the dynamic of the two main protagonists being a therapist and her client SO much. I thought she would be written without much depth because of that, especially her being a woman therapist trying to take care of a man's problems (which DOES come into play). But no she was basically in the same position as Clark but in a more physical way. She keeps herself looking back at what could have been and in turn also stops her from getting any better. She tells Clark she genuinely doesn't know how to make him better, she doesn't even know how to make herself better!! She's a well known author of a book and audio cassettes meant to help others and yet she herself is struggling with her past and moving past it, it's such a deep and visceral kind of C-PTSD she has and even in her position of a therapist, she doesn't know how to get past it.
Which is why her being chased down by the monster version of Clark is so good!!! He came to her to solve his problems and he, at least in the point of the movie we see, has not made much progress. And you can tell in their sessions that she's actually kind of nervous about this and is seeing it almost as a failure on her part. She felt like she was partially responsible for her situation as a kid and responsible for her mother, but she couldn't do anything about it, and now that she's struggling with this guy's complex struggle with his anger and emotional regulation, she sees this also as a failure. When she tells Clark he doesn't have to change and that she doesn't even know how he could change, she sounds so defeated. Like she actually wanted to see him be better as a person but she couldn't get him to that point, and she sees that in herself. She couldn't get herself to a point that the past wasn't affecting her the way it was. So she is literally almost eaten by this version of this man that has eaten his own mental state (i.e. himself). "You are your brain, you dipshit!!!" She yells at him, because his actions are his own and not to be blamed on his brain. Even after Clark is gone, that version of him that she saw still chases her, similar to the version of her mother and the life she lived follows her in her memories.
Mary specifically has this really good sound cue that when she's unsure about doing something, it's loud and booming like a heartbeat. She's nervous about changing her current situation in order to move forward, and when she persists and follows through, it stops immediately. As if she just has to cross that barrier of mentally telling herself she can't.
And her end of the movie, unlike Clark's, isn't her dying or being eaten. She's taken by the Async researchers and they tell her they have to ask her questions and run tests on her. She asks "how long will I be here" and Phil literally doesn't know. She's put into a spot that she's being forced to stay and these people with more power than her are saying she can't leave!!! Literally a revisit to her childhood!!! Also the scenes looking at the inside of her house progressively being "remembered" more and more distorted was so good and it ending on a remembered version of her, showing that regardless of where she physically is, the past is always distorted by her memories and the trauma she has from them.
So in conclusion. The movie was very good and the characters were written to benefit the theme and plot of it while also fleshing them out as full functioning people. Their situations were mirrored into a physical incarnation of the backrooms and the way it explored this in symbolism of their own internal problems was really good.
For a little I felt like we missed Clarkβs spiral and thatβs why the change felt so sudden but in the same scene that Clark shows this βsuddenβ violent part of himself he says βI donβt want to changeβ.
Clark has always been like this. We saw his extreme anger at the start of the movie. His disregard for those around him with how he speaks to and about them. The implied breaking of the glass was that he threw it, not knocked it over.
I was expecting a spiral but he didnβt need one. He was already there.
Me the first half of The Backrooms: "oh I get it. He's a down on his luck failed architect and even more failed furniture store owner who's trying to better himself. He'll probably be fascinated with the furniture/architecture of the backrooms and start selling the items there for money + notoriety. And eventually he'll go deeper and deeper to get more and more items until he gets trapped and encounters The Horrors. A classic tale of hubris :) "
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