Backrooms(2026)

This was an ambitious project that managed to be deeply disconcerting, but struggled to be coherent left me unsatisfied in the end. I feel like the vision is there, and maybe the director just needs a bit more experience to execute something as avant garde as this. 

My reading of it is that the story gives you a world where everyone’s deepest trauma, insecurity and destructive tendencies are interconnected. The scariest thing in your house is a version of yourself that you barely recognize, lurking underneath a furniture store in a strip mall that happens to be the cruelest realization of someone else’s dead dream. 

The idea is actually promising, but the delivery was lacking and it took too long to establish the characters, and the twist came so late in such a whiplash that I was mostly busy interpreting the story and didn’t have enough bandwidth to sit with the emotional implications, which are the real basis of what makes it scary. The over investment of establishments the mystery does not pay off if I’m not given time and space to feel it. 

Unrelated but I actually wonder what kind of therapists have offices like Mary’s. I swear they only exist in film and TV and real-life therapists either work at universities with billion dollar endowments or make poverty wages on betterhelp.