Do you remember Backrooms, the internet phenomenon intersection between creepypasta and liminal spaces? The A24 has decided to transform the impressive webseries of the youtuber Kane Parsons into a feature film, giving the very young filmmaker and budget more unique than rare for such a debut. The film has been at the cinema since May 28 and is seeing good results at the box office: is it just viral hype or the beginning of a new production model?
Backrooms: orrore liminale
Clark’s life has recently taken a negative turn: his relationship with alcohol is increasingly out of control, his wife kicked him out of the house and his furniture store is always on the verge of failure. Not even the therapy sessions with Dr. Kline, a psychologist who is also facing her traumas, seem to help. After being forced to move to sleep in the store, one night Clark makes a disconcerting discovery: over a wall in the basement of the building hides a network of apparently boundless rooms. Without any logical sense and pervaded by a surreal quality, Clark will begin to understand that behind their superlative appearance the rooms conceal nameless secrets and nightmares difficult to describe.
Horror agorafobico
Backrooms is not the first horror debut of a youtuber we reviewed this month. The comparison with Obsession is perhaps undue, because the two films have completely opposite approaches to horror. Where Obsession is very content, a film that takes a tiny premise and extends it to the delusion, exhausting it altogether, Backrooms is boundless, burning. The sense of restlessness in this case derives from the feeling of having just washed the surface, to realize all of a sudden to be a tiny boat that barely floats on an ocean of horrors of which we absolutely do not see the bottom.
Lost in adaptation
This agoraphobic horror (more personal but related to the cosmic one) is particularly well suited to being narrated in online mediums (we think of phenomena to which Backrooms owe much, such as the SCP Foundation or 9M9H9E9), which lead to this process of insufficient discovery. Under this point of view, to do as spectators to someone else who washes the surface of the horror does not scratch the same itching, does not touch the same part of the brain. We are clear: Backrooms is a cute and stylisticly satisfying film, which can give us a creepy experience without being seriously disturbing. Simply put in comparison with its starting material (and cast and budget) the effect is that of a substance that is not all there, under the surface.
Il cast
Chiwetel Ejiofor is Clark, owner of a furniture store on the brink of a nerve crisis. Renate Reinsve is her therapist, even she with a series of traumas caused by her mother (played in flashbacks by Krista Kosonen). Lupita Maxwell and Finn Bennett are Kat and Bobby, young employees of the store involved in Clark’s explorations, while Mark Duplass is Phil, dependent on a mysterious active research body in the Backrooms.
L’articolo Backrooms is a bit too internettiano – The review comes from Dituttounpop.it.
