So anyway after I heard about the idea of the "backrooms" I did go and watch a few of director Kane Parsons shorts -- only a couple though, because I wanted to have some idea of the phenomenon without going so far as to spoil the film for myself. And I found them very creepy! And Parsons does manage to translate that creepiness to big portions of Backrooms, this here Major Motion Picture out in many a theater this weekend. There are profoundly unsettling moments in here -- the section with the rope down the chute springs to mind and sends a reverberating shudder. And Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, both Oscar nominated and with good reason actors, do excellent work filling out sketchy emotional throughlines for their characters, which really comes to matter in the last act. I felt for both of them in exactly the ways the movie wanted me to, and I personally think the film's final shot lands with a shockwave of uncanniness that's still turning my stomach over here now thinking about it a couple weeks later. A fine and unnerving landing.
Skinamarink is admittedly experimental -- I'm fully aware that most people who watch Skinamarink can't stand it. I just was never one of those people, and I fucking love the experience of losing myself into its static nightmare space for one hundred excrutiating minutes. When its scares do come, peeking their horrible eyes out from the blackness, they have wormed their ways deep into my being in ways that, I gotta say, nothing in Backrooms manages. (Save that final shot. I really loved that final shot, which in an instant telegraphs an entire story about A.I. that I was not at all prepared for. A sneak attack!)
The two films are two very different takes on the Liminal phenom, and it's not really fair to compare them -- I just think that the entire idea of Liminal Horror depends on a realization of stillness, of losing yourself into a netherworld that you're being presented with, and I personally find the tack that Backrooms takes to be less effective. Introducing us to characters, with back-stories and motivations and relationships -- you know, all the stuff that makes Backrooms a "movie" -- it's just inherently distancing. Parsons' short films didn't have to indulge that stuff -- they were, thanks to their brevity and form, able to just drop us in the scary place without distraction. And yeah -- "characters" and "stories" are probably a necesarry concession to making a twenty million dollar studio film. I don't hold it against Parsons', who made a solid and respectable and oft unnerving film. I'm just ultimately a Skinamarink girlie, I guess. Toss me off the deep end with no discernable markers whatsoever and I'm in heaven, inside that hell. Now one of you young people direct me to all the YouTube shorts I should be watching, please!
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