I fully agree about both those movies. Both very effective at creating unease (and with respectable plots and good acting and effects too, in my view).
A lot of that unease, in those movies as well as in Hereditary (referenced earlier in the thread) comes from their sound designs. All these young filmmakers learned from David Lynch, I believe, tips and tricks for using sound to disorient audiences.
Backrooms didn’t seem as, well, severe in its sound design–just as well, because it can be tough to experience those more extreme movies (unless one turns off the sound!)
That was clever. It fit well with the time period. And its presence was ambiguous: had it been placed there by the Async people? (perhaps hoping to communicate with people pulled in from all over the world?) Or had some other entity operating the Backrooms constructed it from some scientist’s memory? V’ger, is that you???
IMHO Christopher Nolan is a master at combining sound design with mind-bending, time-warping settings. TENET, Dunkirk, Interstellar, and Inception all come to mind. These are all films that can feel both epically spacious and menacingly claustrophobic at the same time.
Dunkirk specifically used a specific note progression in the score to intentionally create tension. I forget all the technical details but the score was meant to sound like it was constantly rising without ever reaching an actual crescendo.
Backrooms, I don’t think needed much sound beyond buzzing fluorescents and muffled footsteps.
And Backrooms does benefit from the sensory associations we have with fluorescent lights (and their sounds). That phenomenon is, or at least was, part of everyday life for many–and yet it’s largely absent from our filmed entertainment. (Until this movie, of course.)
I would disagree with that statement a bit. That sort of stark fluorescent lighting phenomenon is frequently used in film and television to present an oppressive, dull, institutional environment.
Other films like Fight Club or The Matrix have similar fluorescent light settings.
It’s fairly common filming shorthand. Job sucks - workers in cheap rumpled suits in windowless cubicle farm with buzzing, flickering fluorescents. Awesome job - workers in expensive tailored suits in office with lots of wood paneling, color, textures, high ceilings, panoramic skyline views.
You’re right about that, but none of those make the windowless-fluorescent place the characters’ world for the bulk of the movie (which is part of what’s striking about Backrooms even if it’s not unique). Instead, as you imply, that world’s existence stands for the need to change one’s life–to move to something better.
I looked it up and will check it out. Decent cast, which often implies that the screenplay is respectable!
In the category of stories about liminal spaces, Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi is getting made into a stage play (Royal Shakespeare Company) and an animated film (Laika). I will be fascinated to see how they make it work on stage.
I remember Backrooms having quite a bit of low frequency rumble through much of the movie.
I picked up some nice Sennheiser headphones for watching cinematic movies without disturbing the neighbors (and also not being disturbed by the neighbors, or the dishwasher, or leaf blowers, etc…) and the rumble was pretty significant. I think I ended up having to turn the volume down a couple clicks because the tension / ear fatigue eventually got to be too much for me.
EDIT: There is a small chance I’m mixing it up with a different film. I need to go back and check out the post-credits scene to be sure I saw it anyway. I’ll give a quick scan for the rumble then.
Okay I just scanned through, and yeah, there is a very loud low frequency rumble through all of the scenes in the backrooms. Over half the time there’s an actual “musical” score that the low bass rumble is part of, but it’s discordant and incoherent. Produced by musical instruments, at least.
But I only hear the low rumble in the headphones, where it is super loud. If I just use my TV speakers I pretty much can’t hear the low rumble at all.
It definitely adds to the unsettling feel of it all, but it is almost distractingly loud. I wonder if I would have gotten a headache from watching this in the theater.
I think it’s all about AI. The whole backroom area feels like it was generated by 2-3 years ago AI. Some things are almost right, until you look closely. Other things just don’t make any sense. Normal life is a mix of hard and boring, but here is this new thing that is exciting, but also messed up and dangerous.
2 hours and 52 minutes, filmed in IMAX, of Alec talking about dishwashers.
Yeah, there’s a strong contingent of folks who believe the movie was explicitly made as an allegory on AI. Could be. It’s easy to see how that fits the older AI-generated materials, as you note (hands with six fingers and all that sort of thing).
Of course the movie is set more than three decades back, which in itself doesn’t seem to tie into commentary on AI. (As with so many movies set before 2000, some of this choice of time period is about removing cell phones as a viable means of communicating when in danger. That lack of capacity helps build suspense.)
Some of the genesis of this is (as noted in this thread) an old photo of an old space, which grabbed people’s interest. Yellow and irregular and empty. None of that aspect seems tied to AI.
But I’ll grant you that much of what’s been built on that original internet phenomenon, can be interpreted in terms of a commentary on AI.
That does fit. (There are more ideas in that movie than some people give it credit for, such as the ‘copy of a copy of a copy’ aspect and its “telephone” variant.)
In my previous post I mentioned the original photo that inspired the Backrooms phenomenon. It’s shown in a post by @Darren_Garrison , reachable from this quote:
A short video (under 2 minutes) shows the ‘before and after’ of the real-life original space, here:
I saw it tonight. The first scene made me want to crawl out of my skin. I’m not very good at finding my way around, you see. This ramped up the tension considerably.
Then it got progressively less scary (with the exception of the kitchen scene, shudder.)
It was very interesting visually, I thought it had strong directing and acting. I thought the script fell apart, by the end I felt it was all pretty meaningless. With the hamfisted therapy moments ("I don’t want to change!) I read it as some kind of metaphor for the subconscious, the guy was being sustained by his shitty memories, and then his own id literally ate him. That’s what happens if you don’t deal with your issues!
The woman’s memories of being cooped up by a crazy mother never really went anywhere. I figured it would be relevant to the plot somehow. Nope. But we did see she has her own backrooms.
I would have liked it better without the final scene where they tried to make it sound scientific. “We don’t understand anything about it.” Yeah the human brain is like that. The scene reveals nothing and tells you nothing else about the character. There’s no character journey that I could discern. The only thing I could really make of that is she had dealt with her own shit, which made her the survivor.
There is so much discussion in the beginning on that lady’s cassette about how the mind has unexplored rooms and we cut ourselves off from them. This was not a subtle film.
I guess some people think it is about AI. I didn’t get that.
Anyway I thought the directing and set design were great. I would watch something else by this same director as long as it had a different screenwriter. Hat’s off to that achievement at age 20.