I feel like the Backrooms movie is going to become another litmus test about people’s willingness to engage with a piece of media.
Because you cannot tell me that the kid who spent a summer meticulously crafting a 1:1 recreation of a demolished Texas mall for a psychological horror series on YouTube and who put so much time and effort into thinking about the psychology of The Oldest View….
…just so happened to skimp on dialogue and purpose for his cinematic debut film.
If you came away from the backrooms movie going “well there were plot and character moments in there that weren’t really explored and went nowhere” I am telling you that you are not paying attention.
This is one of those films where every line of dialogue, every odd thing you see in a frame, every unusual moment and shot composition, has a purpose and reason for being there.
And it’s not the film’s fault if you don’t wanna put in the effort to try and piece together what’s going on.
Now I’m not saying that makes it an inherently better film or something. You can still dislike it if you want. Taste is subjective. But it IS the type of movie that you get more out of the more you spend thinking about it than if you just brush off any weird moment or thing you didn’t understand as “weak writing.”
Like, I cannot stop thinking about the film and the more I do the more connections and moments I find that flesh out the world and the characters to me. Even the most innocuous little details are suddenly starting to make sense and offer up insight into the larger picture of this world…and it’s leading me to go down this conspiracy theory rabbit hole that makes its connection to the YouTube series even wilder and existentially creepier imo.
I feel like people who do that are going to get SO MUCH MORE out of this film than someone who just watches it once and shrugs their shoulders and goes “well that didn’t make sense to me.” Unpacking it all is part of the experience. That’s part of the fun. And if you don’t wanna engage with that, that’s fine. But that doesn’t make the film “bad.”
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