Its really a film about how the ‘talking cure’ cannot be the be all and end all, especially in a situation where you are literally inside someone else’s psychic manifestations! And in the end its all about getting to the point where the Therapist has to break from her calm demeanour and bluntly say to her patient (in the funniest line of the film) that: “It’s all in your brain, dipshit!” (I do wonder what that
Euro Brady guy would make of it!)
One of the criticisms I have heard about the film is that it keeps breaking the tension of the Backrooms by continually going back not just to the ‘real world’ but inside the memories of the Renate Reinsve character, Mary. But that turns out to be fundamental to the theme of the film because the psychology of both Clark and Mary (nobody else really matters in this film,
especially anything to do with Async, despite their presence topping and tailing this otherwise self-contained story) is getting ‘liberated’ in a strange way by the Backrooms.
Clark is the main character for the majority of the film, but ends up going from powerless victim of his collapsing marriage and failing furniture store (and lost dream of being an architect) to suddenly being liberated with his discovery of the Backrooms, to the extent that he becomes the villain of the piece (one of the best call backs to the web series is to that final shot of Static Dead End, with the wooden chair sitting on a small hillock in the middle of a room, which gets turned into an opulent Royal purple coloured throne here). It is an open question of whether he actively lures his two companions on the expedition into being a sacrifice to the environment - it plays initially like a terrible monster is preying on them, and Clark is distraught in the moment (but tellingly runs away from Kat in terror rather than trying to follow her) and we only find out later that it is a monstrous manifestation of Clark’s own psyche doing the preying.
(Incidentally I was very impressed at the moment that ends that mid-film expedition sequence because if you remember the main trailer, it ends with a brief moment of someone filmed in long shot against another wall. I had been wondering if that was showing someone else finding another entry point, but it turns out that the most creepy thing about that moment was something that was there in plain sight all along: the question of who exactly is holding the camera during that long shot. Because it ain’t any of our three characters in the Backrooms at that point in time!)
And that is countered by Mary’s own character arc, going from calm and collected Therapist to her flashbacks revealing more and more childhood trauma (we see her as a child with her mother putting handprints in concrete in front of her house, which we then jump to immediately seeing being demolished; then we get an even more revealing situation of the mother keeping Mary trapped inside the house because of the mother’s fear of the outside, taping newspapers to the windows and - Backrooms-style - putting furniture in bizarrely but purposefully arranged piles against the doors to keep out whatever intruders she is scared of getting inside), which is showing that she has just as many traumatic issues to deal with as Clark does with his failed marriage.
In a strange but fascinating way the film ends up being a battle between two psyches of our main characters within that liminal space, like a cross between The Cell (the therapist entering the mind of a madman) and One Missed Call (the way that you have a kind of Top Trumps battle of a heroine who has the past history of abuse that is able to rise to the challenge presented by a ghostly antagonist’s own anger). Whilst Clark ends up seduced by the power the environment affords him and is then killed by his own manifestation of his Captain Clark mascot that is twisted and combined with together with the rival “Big Wayne” furniture dealer as a representation of curdled ambitions; Mary instead is only able to escape through using the totem of the piece of concrete with the handprint on to bash in the Captain Clark mascot’s head!
So many films came to mind when watching, and a lot of them I did not expect to be thinking about! The ‘dinner table’ sequence is kind of astonishingly unexpected, as Mary is knocked out and tied to a chair by Clark (the losing and regaining consciousness moment is where we get the similar imagery from that first teaser trailer of the downwards movement between Mary's mother's home as it morphs and disintegrates into the Backrooms) and then he describes what he has made of the world, before they role play from their early therapy session the argument that ended his marriage one more time. Its very like the dinner scene from Texas Chain Saw Massacre with the helpless heroine, but it is also
very Lynchian (which makes it amusing that Reinsve apparently told Parsons that she thought they were going into Lynch territory and Parsons had not seen Blue Velvet!), because it all takes place in a bizarrely strange ‘normality’, with onlooking figures (including a woman in a red dress!) that Clark takes a strange pleasure in cutting apart, because they are only recreations of human beings, not actual flesh and blood. But unfortunately Clark has as much trouble in controlling these figures as he did other human beings!
And then it all climaxes in a chase through the Backrooms between Mary and the Captain Clark monster which both feels as if it obviously references Kane’s Oldest View series (in the moment of having to climb stairs to an ‘exit door’ over a bottomless chasm) and in the moment of Mary struggling across a room of sofas, injuring herself in the process, reminded me both of the wire room struggle moment in Suspiria
and the final pell-mell rush through the psyche in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind simultaneously! I do also wonder what Michel Gondry makes of this film!
Following that, I loved that Mary gets out into the furniture store again, but its obviously not the
actual furniture store but still inside the Backrooms, and that becomes the setting for the big showdown battle!
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We do get what we came for in terms of the ‘found footage’ aspects. The film actually begins with the Async logo straight into what could work as its own standalone entry into the web series of an unfortunate hazmat suitor getting lost in the Backrooms and eventually grabbed and seemingly killed (a first, I think!) by a monster. Then we get Clark’s solo exploration; Clark’s exploration with Kat and Bobby (which ends badly for all); then Mary’s entry, exploration, capture and final chase. So the audience is definitely getting the material they would expect from this! And some of the negative reactions to the ‘head scratching third act’ I think are probably surrounding the introduction of the giant Captain Clark mascot as the primary antagonist, which could seem rather goofy, but with its long grasping limbs and relentless thump of its wooden leg as it chases after Mary is rather terrifying (though it does feature a comic callback to Clark’s ‘shoddy wooden leg in his advert’ during the final battle, as Mary shatters it!). And it shows that this film is surprisingly close to Kane’s Oldest View series, which had its own chasing mascot figure through that mall!
And whilst they are really (really!) lightly touched upon in this film, I did really like the way that Async was used here. The message in different languages ‘welcoming aliens to Earth’ is being played through speakers attached to the caveman standee as initially seen in Found Footage 3 and now developed into a major element here, because whilst it is not explicitly stated, it appears that Async is using the standee with the speakers attached as a device to attract whatever monsters are roaming around the general area, so that they can capture them on film. Although in this case, Async only captures Clark instead!
Mark Duplass turns up extremely briefly in the film, wordlessly looking on at the image of Clark in the Backrooms CCTV footage; then his wordless reaction of recognition when at home with his family and seeing the Captain Clark advert; and then he finally has a scene with Mary at the end when she is saved from the monster and brought back through Async’s official threshold, and is being interrogated by him. That scene is really nicely written to have the Duplass character himself talk of being enamoured by the Backrooms, and then Mary herself recognises that she is in much the same situation that Clark was, of now being the object of study herself.
The film ends with the perfect shot which suggests that anyone who has entered the Backrooms has kind of added their psyche and image into that liminal space. As with Clark having recreations of people from his mind, but the Backrooms has misremembered them into having multiple sets of eyes, or a lamp growing from their back; we end on the real Mary being out and in Async’s custody (asking what will happen to her, and as we know from what happened to Peter Tench in the web series, probably nothing good!) but also, after a succession of beautifully twisted images of all of the 'real world' locations manifesting themselves inside the Complex, it ends on the image of another Mary spawned by the Backrooms, sitting quietly in an empty room somewhere but ‘misremembered’ in almost the ultimate statement on A.I. with her covering hands having far too many fingers to properly pass!
), but this is the first time of actually sitting through a film outside of my own home for a while. So long in fact that the cinema in Stockport where I saw Chicken Run back in 2000 has long been demolished to make way for a Holiday Inn, and a brand new cinema built just down the road, which is where I went for the screening of Backrooms on Friday! Nice wide and comfy sofa-style seats there as well, which was very different from the kind I remember having to squeeze into back in the day!