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There's some interesting stuff going on here. Liked it more than I expected. There was something different about the aesthetics of the movie that I felt but couldn't really put words to until after I had watched the movie. It's like a video game, the angles, the camera work, the sound design, everything. When they're inside the backrooms it's shot like a video game. I found it really interesting to see gaming language translated into cinematic language. You always see video games borrowing from cinema, Kojima's elaborate cut scenes are a good example. Or even the Last of Us games, the cut scenes tell the story and carry the emotion. It's a game but it uses cinematic language to do the actual work. In Backrooms, you get to see cinema borrow from the grammar of gaming. You get to see someone pull from the experiences and sensations that gaming afforded them and turn that into something new and unique. It made me really excited to see what the next generation of filmmakers is going to create. It's like how certain filmmakers pull from music, or painting, puppetry, or theater. This generation has a whole new form to play with. A whole new art form to pull from and translate into the language of cinema. That He-Man trailer popped into my head just now. There's like a little scene where he transforms and they use an impact frame to add some oomph to it. That movie is probably buns but it seems like such a playful way to create. To just grab something from another medium and make it your own. I think a lot of millennials and zoomers grew up with the internet, video games, anime, etc, and now we're getting to a point where these mediums are beginning to talk to each other and cross pollinate. I guess the other mediums were always talking to cinema but cinema didn't wanna listen. It didn't wanna lower itself and talk to lesser forms. These days, in the eyes of younger people, these mediums are all equal. So, now we finally get to see what happens when cinema sits down and talks to these other mediums and takes from them.

It was an entertaining movie but it left me the moment I walked out of the theater. I feel like good horror movies etch themselves onto your brain. You see stuff so striking that you can’t get it out of your mind. You see an open door, hear an odd creak or see someone approaching you from the shadows and your mind immediately sinks back into the world of the movie and you feel like what happened in the movie is gonna happen to you. Spending a few hours alone after a scary movie is almost as scary as watching the movie itself. The fear lingers on and it feels like something’s not right, like something might happen. Thats what makes horror movies so fun. This movie was entertaining but nothing really stayed with me after the fact.

Not gonna lie, I was lured in by those clips of Mads. They made the movie seem more interesting than it was. The gangster parts were a drag and despite Mikkelsen's aura, I couldn't bring myself to care about his part of the story either. I feel like there's a more interesting story hidden within that character. If we could just spend more time with him, go inside his head, follow him as he goes about his day, watch him eat, watch him sleep, watch him exist... Yeah, didn't really like it. Maybe I had already imagined a different movie in my head and nothing in this movie would've satisfied me? Idk. At the same time, I feel like truly great movies can overcome that bias and shut you up, they show you something that goes beyond what you imagined and you end up appreciating them even more because of it. I didn't feel that way with Bleeder.