FilmsCanChangeTheWorld

I really liked this film and would recommend it. It takes inspiration from sources like Lynch, the Rusty Lake games, Jacob's Ladder, and weaves together its own personalised vision and meaningful experience through a fractured human mind in pain. Weikart's directional-style parallels modern creatives like Ari Aster and Coralie Fargeat that I'm increasingly falling in love with. Bold contrasting colours, clean lines, visually symmetrical - a feast for the eyes. I'm truly impressed with how the film makes the absolute most out of a smaller budget and packs a wallop of quality storytelling and filmmaking. What struck me most is Weikart's understanding and thoughtful insights into how human's process their pain and why it's so important for us to do so.

There's only so many ways you can play with the Backrooms in a narrative context, and they did what I'm guessing most future storytellers will do who will explore this re-emerging subgenre. They went for internalised psychological metaphor (Jacob's Ladder style) - which is exactly what it has to be but for some reason it didn't play well here. Sadly this prototype doesn't capture the essence of what we as the audience have already come to expect from the clips on social media and Kane Pixels videos. It's all about the tone and mood of the uncanny valley which invites us into the dread of a solipsist hellscape, and while they executed the obvious plot points to get there, they failed to figure out how to create that truthful tonal essence of dread and Lynchian ominousness. Hopefully future Backrooms/Liminal Spaces artists will learn from this and continue finding the way towards what pulls us towards this space.

Original, thoughtful, beautiful, intelligent. The film takes significant moments we all confront during our coming of age years, and concentrates them into loosely connected symbolic vignettes, exploring issues around identity and the roles we're assigned in life, willingly or not. It utilises a tone of suburban isolationism and being lost in the meaningless unknown to keep us off balance and wandering through uncertainty. While the narrative structure does not present a palatable or traditional plot or any form of character development, nor does the presentation guide us on what we're supposed to think or feel about anything, there is an opportunity to see the world through the lens of melancholic but unthreatening nihilism. If you can sit with slow burn, abstract narratives then you might be into this.