I watched Backrooms (2026). 🎥
This happened to my wife one time in the basement of Sterling Furniture .
It’s probably really her story to tell as I wasn’t there, but she doesn’t like to talk about it now. it began with a desperate, sleepless search to find an identical replacement for a specific make and model of recliner, but by my memory of the scattered, panicked descriptions she gave in her phone call to me just after having made it back out, it involved involved flickering basement lights, furniture displayed in a repurposed bank vault, an ancient, incontinent Pomeranian stalking her from room to room, and finally a handwritten order form with pre-order down payment supposedly secured via one of those manual credit card carbon copy sliding imprinter machines. Somehow she made it out, but she never heard word of the recliner she supposedly ordered.
I myself clipped into this place numerous times from the basements of LDS (f.k.a. Mormon) temples doing baptisms for the dead in the 90s. The ultimate liminal spaces, I just didn’t recognize it at the time.
I really vibed with the ambiguity of a lot of this: an unnerving meditation on the emptiness of both the physical and online spaces that supposedly connect all of us, both familiar to us and at the same time endless, uncanny, and ultimately unknowable. There is always another doorway, another room, another video, another post, another artifact, another curated pile of products, another memory, another mystery, another iteration, another objectification. When some of the more stock body horror and gore elements suddenly popped in late in the movie I was taken out of this a bit. It almost felt to me like they were obligatory additions so as to check off enough boxes to make this a certifiable regulation horror movie. But maybe they were necessary and actually do contribute a lot of meaning-making to the film? I don’t want to spoil any more than I already have, though, as I don’t to mark this review as a spoiler.
No matter, the ending was suitably ambiguous and I do look forward to the already-confirmed sequel without many expectations.
I also loved seeing the making-of bonus bits on the blu-ray, as I had so much curiosity while watching about the extent to which the sets were physically constructed versus computer generated. I was not disappointed by the answers and tricks shown.
✅ Hooptober13 Criteria
- Film #22
- Country #5 - Canada
- Decade #1 - 2020s (x4)
Also counts towards one of my 3-film mini-challenges:
- 3 liminal horror movies - #3
Source: blu-ray borrowed from the Salt Lake County Library