Backrooms

Last night I went to see Backrooms at a late night screening and I found it very interesting and quite unsettling.  Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is an alcoholic who is angry about his recent divorce and his failed ambition of becoming an architect.  He frequently rants to his therapist Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) and she tries to help him see how his patterns of behavior have created an endless cycle of unhappiness from which he cannot escape but she is also suffering from her own never ending loop of trauma stemming from a childhood spent with a mentally ill mother.  Clark, who is now living in the discount furniture warehouse where he works, notices flickering lights in the basement and goes to investigate which leads him to a portal to another reality filled with an endless space.  He wanders through a maze of rooms that are connected by long hallways before he is chased out by an unseen entity.  When Mary is skeptical about what he has experienced, he starts spending more and more time in this alternate reality and eventually becomes trapped.  Mary gets a disturbing message from Clark which prompts her to go to his warehouse to find him and she ends up in the space as his hostage.  Can she escape?  While the metaphor is a bit on the nose, I liked the exploration of how you can get trapped inside your head by memories that can be warped by time and a skewed perception.  Both Clark and Mary encounter malformed objects and people within the space because they can't remember them correctly and I was particularly struck by how Mary's experience becomes increasingly more distorted as she moves down through the levels because she has buried her trauma so deeply within her subconscious.  The visuals, which feature a drab monochromatic yellow color palette, uncanny architecture, and harsh fluorescent lighting, are incredibly disconcerting and the sound design evokes a sense of dread that is almost unbearable (I hate the buzzing of fluorescent lights so this just about drove me crazy).  The camerawork is very effective at building tension because it is from each character's POV, especially when grainy found footage is used, and you are never entirely sure what will be lurking around the corner.  Both Ejiofor and Reinsve give highly restrained performances that ground the dreamlike sequences in reality and this kept me engaged even with so much repetition in the space (see also Exit 8).  This might not be for everyone (some might find it too ambiguous) but I can't stop thinking about it!

Note:  I enjoyed this more than Exit 8 (movies about liminal spaces are having a moment) because my attention never wavered.