Backrooms

Coming from a fan of the backrooms for many years, it wasn’t that good. The environment? Perfect. The set design? Phenomenal. The soundtrack? Amazing. My issue lies in the writing of the plot and the characters. A lot of people defending this movie claim that people who disliked it were expecting a TikTok Roblox game type of movie with a hundred thousand levels and tons of different entities. This is not the case. I didn’t expect that, and I’m glad they didn’t do that. They also claim that haters don’t understand the underlying message. I understood it. I know it’s about cycles and habits, and how you get so comfortable in them that you loose your sense of self. And I understand the inevitable dread of slowly forgetting something that was your normal for the longest time. With all of this in mind, the movie did not properly execute these in my opinion. When you have a movie that is set in such a repetitive yet strong environment (which in this case is a good thing), you have to have strongly written characters to fall back on. The concepts of these characters were good in their own rights, but they felt unfinished. Clark was a very intriguing protagonist. I liked how they established his character, albeit they could’ve had him interacting with the normal world a bit more to build that sense of loneliness and lack of human connection he feels. His obsession with mapping out and exploring the backrooms makes sense on a basic level. However, I don’t understand how he got from one to one hundred off camera in terms of his insanity. We saw absolutely no progression of his mental unstableness when he was trapped in the backrooms. It didn’t make sense for him to suddenly turn into a sort of antagonist half way through the film with no indications that he’d do so from the start. Mary had the issue of an excellently intriguing backstory, with no follow through. She had such potential as a main character, and I love how the backrooms portrayed her. The sequence of her living room slowly turning more and more unfamiliar and unrecognizable with every descent was SO cool and representative of her psyche. However, towards the end of the movie it felt as though she were falling into the stereotypical end girl character.  Now, the other problem I had with this movie is its plot. I think it had so much potential. I love how the MRI Machine company was portrayed. They were mysterious enough so that you didn’t know if they were actually the good guys are not, and you still don’t know their intentions behind studying the backrooms. That was very interesting and I loved that part of it. With that being said, Clark and Mary’s story was lackluster. Clark’s initial discovery of the backrooms was at first very interesting and realistic. I think his actor accurately portrayed how a normal person would react when suddenly finding this alternate reality, especially in a building he’s known like the back of his hand for years. However after a few minutes, it got old. The fact that he was able to map it out so quickly, the fact that he automatically knew how to get out of there felt very… safe. The whole point of the backrooms is that you’re supposed to feel uneasy because you’re in an environment that feels so familiar yet you’re so lost. The dining room had potential if it weren’t for the fact that we saw no progression of Clark’s insanity. There also didn’t feel like there was hardly any urgency in the film. I felt as though the characters where just meandering instead of running for their lives.  I’ve never written a review this long before, sooo yeah sorry if it sounds rambly lol. Also no hate if you like the movie, this is just what I got from it :)