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If you’re looking for a scary Halloween movie, skip “Backrooms.” I had high hopes when it first hit streaming. After missing it in theaters, I eagerly picked it up when it first hit streaming. I was even considering throwing it on my Halloween watch list again if it was good.
Spoiler alert. I watch “Obsession” again. I said before that it might go down as the top horror movie of the year, and “Backrooms” did little to sway me. If anything, he might have convinced me.
‘Backrooms’ Need Better Characters
I think one of the most disappointing details about the film is the cast. That’s not a knock on the acting, but the characters themselves. The film does something right by laying down the formal group of teenagers who run around the Backrooms getting killed left and right. Aiming at an adult (and then another adult) adds a measure of maturity to the film.
However, things do not go beyond the relationship between Clark and his therapist, Mary. If anything, the film may be seen as a metaphor for a man using the Backrooms to try to explain his state of mind to his therapist. If explaining his thoughts and reasoning is like explaining a dog to someone who has never seen a dog before, we may be on to something. But the film never takes things that long.
We get a bit of roleplay between Clark and his wife (played by Mary) in two separate scenes, but those two could be skipped to focus more on the Backrooms. The audience spends a lot of time looking at yellow walls, but the jump scares are very tame, and we don’t really see how weird things can get. We get a glimpse of it when Clark is trying to find Bobby and Kat, but things just go haywire after that.
Too little fear, too many questions
It is also unclear why Captain Clark decided to let Clark live (for a time) or how long he waited to lure Mary into the Backrooms (or why). Given the origins of the Backrooms, it is possible that this was left up to the audience. After all, what are Backrooms but fodder for endless internet discussions?
Overall, however, there was little fear and suspicion to be had. There were no questions about what the Backrooms were or how they came to be answered, although I did not expect them. Asking them to show us how the Backrooms were made is like asking a magician to reveal the secrets behind his card tricks. We are still way too early in this franchise to do such a thing. If anything, the unanswered questions give the movie enough juice to stay relevant among relevant Reddit boards until the next movie comes out.
In the end, we need to know how the Backrooms came to be, and if they can be closed down, but after the movie ended, I was left with no curiosity to find out the answers to these questions or even what happened to Mary. The next film might want to switch to a brand new team and leave her fate in doubt.
One last thing
I will give the film one thing that I noticed on my first watch but forgot about afterwards (watching someone cut into a person for eating literally does that). The still life version of Clark’s wife isn’t running when she scalped, which was awesome, not scary, by the way.
But she runs when she hears Captain Clark approaching. A friend of mine pointed out that this was a great way to show how abusive Clark could be, since we never show him directly. We see glimpses of Clark’s anger during his play scenes with Mary, in which his problems with alcohol are revealed, but the Backrooms version of his wife running away at the sound of his footsteps was a good way to show their relationship and give fans another look at how terrible Clark was before his sudden death.
Or not so suddenly. Once he stole Mary, it was clear that he was not going to stay until the end of the film. Anyway, good addiction to bad garbage, that’s exactly what I said after this movie ended.
Will I see the sequel? Maybe. Like the original “Five Nights at Freddy’s” movie, I saw things I liked with a lot of room for improvement. Unfortunately, they kept the bad thing and canceled the sequel. Fingers crossed “Backrooms” doesn’t make the same mistake.
