I feel like our minds are haunted by places trapped in memory. The hallways in your grade school. The exact sound of the cellar door shutting in your childhood home. That office you temped in at college. The identical floor plans of all the chain stores. They live on in imagination, long after those places are gone.
Backrooms gets at the way place, reflected in our memories, reveals our own interior architecture. The feelings we had growing up. The loneliness of knowing a whole world of emotions from a past only you really know. That past is forever gone, except in the way you can feel the things it did to make you who you are. And in memory it concentrates and warps, losing some of its coherence while still maintaining that impact on how you see and feel.
I have nightmares about finding new rooms in my house--ones left vacant from the 80s, or 90s, full of dusty furniture in nonsensical arrangements. I think my brain is doing a bit of what the film is doing. And the film is just as unsettling as those dreams.
By the third act, the plot gets pretty weird--even by my standards, and keep in mind I love the work of David Lynch. This is much weirder than a major motion picture is generally allowed to be. But this film goes there, and it doesn't apologize for it. I wasn't sure if I liked it at first, but as I sit with it I think I do. I don't think anything trying to reflect the interiority of how we think could be anything less than wonderful and strange.
