Backrooms

tbh I don’t quite understand the hype around this film.  The idea of the Backrooms started with 4chan images and later evolved into a YouTube short film series, but the transition to a feature-length film just didn’t work for me. The film had two possible directions it could have taken: either stay abstract and ambiguous, or develop a convincing backstory for the Backrooms. Instead, it takes a middle road, throwing multiple possible explanations at the audience without ever fully committing to any of them. A lot of people seem to interpret that as “artsy” or intellectually ambiguous, but to me it just feels lazy.  If they had, for example, fully committed to the psychoanalytic angle, and treated the Backrooms as a reflection of the human mind that becomes increasingly fragmented and distorted through (traumatic) memories, with the strange pirate at the end representing Clarke’s Über-Ich, they could have explored a genuinely interesting idea. Instead, those themes are only hinted at before actually being undermined by the film’s other developments.  There was a really strong idea at the core of this project, and they did a great job bringing it to life visually. However, the writing and story development feel underwhelming. It‘s cool that A24 had the confidence to hire a 20-year-old director and let him do his own thing, but the final result still feels „unfinished“.