Thoughts on Backrooms

    At the Alamo Drafthouse in Lower Manhattan, I went with a friend to see Backrooms, a 2026 sci-fi psychological horror film directed by Kane Parsons, based on his webseries and inspired by the Backrooms creepypasta, and written by Will Soodik. 

    The Backrooms creepypasta has a lot of Internet lore to it, but started with an anonymous photo taken in 2002 posted on 4chan in 2019 of a large, empty room with an unsettling yellow appearance, taken at an empty furniture store in Wisconsin. The photo led to people expanding on the concept of liminal spaces, with interconnected Backrooms and dangerous creatures that roam the spaces. The Backrooms has inspired indie video games and short films, as well as the "innies" world of Severance and in American Horror Stories. 

    Kane Parsons, then 16, uploaded a short horror film in 2022 titled The Backrooms (Found Footage) under the name Kane Pixels, presented as a VHS tape by a filmmaker in 1990 who goes through the Backrooms and is pursued by a monster. The short film was a great success, leading to a series of short films with more backstories added to it, and Parsons got a deal with A24 to develop a mainstream feature length film of it.

    The film takes place in 1990, and starts with a VHS tape shot by researcher Naren Wayne (Avan Jogia) going through the Backrooms, where he gets separated from his group and is chased and attacked by an unknown monster. The story continues with two main characters: furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who is struggling with alcoholism and going through a divorce, and his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve), who promotes her self-help audio tapes in local commercials (as does in Clark promoting his furniture store) and who is working through her own trauma from having grown up with a mentally ill, agoraphobic mother. She has him do a role-play exercise with her playing his wife, which leads to him blowing up at her in abusive rants about paying for everything and supporting her while she's a law student, revealing a lot of pent-up anger and nastiness in Clark.

    Clark, having been kicked out of his house by his wife, has taken up residence in the store, and through electrical outages and flickering lights, discovers an invisible portal through the wall of the store's basement and walks through the wall into the Backrooms, a labyrinthine expanse of dull yellow rooms, with narrow pathways leading to small doors or windows, with piled-up furniture, mysterious voices heard from recordings, and the growling sounds of a creature in the distance. Clark escapes the creature and returns back to the store, but when he tells Mary about it, she thinks he is having delusions from alcohol withdrawal and is skeptical and patronizing towards him. 

    Clark brings along two young people, the assistant manager Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett), to help him film the Backrooms as proof of his claims, where the VHS video is more like Kane Parsons' original web series. When calamity happens and Clark isn't returning for more therapy appointments, Mary goes to the furniture store and discovers the Backrooms for herself.

    I found this movie really interesting. I didn't know anything about the Backrooms, so a lot of the lore I had to catch up on before seeing the movie, and I liked the set design of the maze of rooms, as well as the sound design, especially when the monster is eventually revealed, with fantastic practical effects that were portrayed by a real person (actor and former basketball player Robert Bobroczkyi), but with an uncomfortable puppetry movement. I liked how weird and unsettling it felt, and I liked the found footage style of the VHS camcorder videos, even if it followed found footage cliches of cutting off just before the big bad is seen.

    I did like how the Backrooms changed based on a person's memories and traumas, and being a misremembered copy of reality. A line that is repeated a couple of times is when Clark says, then later Mary, that to describe the Backrooms to someone is like trying to describe a dog to someone who has never seen one before, and getting some details right, but still making it sound confusing.

    Chiwetel Ejiofor is fantastic in this film, playing a guy with just barely constrained rage bubbling under him, and he did some great forehead acting in one scene, seeing his forehead scrunch up as he emoted. Renate Reinsve was really good in playing someone trying to play the role of the understanding, calm therapist while wrestling with her own childhood trauma and repressed issues.

    I especially liked the in-movie commercials where Clark is dressed up as the pirate mascot of his store, with a peg leg strapped to his leg while trying to hobble on it, and a fake parrot on his shoulder, and promoting the furniture store; and Mary in her commercials for her New Age-like therapy audio tapes promising to "open the windows" to further enlightenment and understanding.

    It was good going into this movie cold, as there were some reveals that were in the web series with the backstory of the Backrooms but that I didn't know, and Mark Duplass in a bureaucratic role that feels akin to Paul Reiser's role in Aliens made me hate him a lot, and he's a director/actor who seems like a nice guy, but who I've never liked as an actor, so it was a funny moment of feeling vindicated in not liking him when he popped up.

    I'm happy that my friend and I saw this together, and that I could catch up to the Internet lore to these liminal spaces.

Thoughts on I Love Boosters

    Last week at the Village East Cinema in Manhattan, I saw I Love Boosters, a 2026 absurdist crime comedy written and directed by Boots Riley. The film centers on Corvette (Keke Palmer), the ringleader of a group of "boosters," shoplifters who resell high-end designer clothes at a discount to survive. She and her friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) create elaborate distractions to pull off their heists, like having a white woman accomplice distract the salespeople, or having one person fake an injury while another steals. Despite all of this, the trio are still broke, and Corvette lives in an abandoned fast-food chicken restaurant, and is haunted by the vision of a giant ball of past-due bills rolling towards her.

    The "Velvet Gang" target the Metro Designers chain, run by designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore), a billionaire who Corvette both despises for her capitalism and loves for her fashion design, being an aspiring fashion designer herself. Christie regularly appears in the media to claim that her designs are her vision of transformative art, of seeing her customers as wanting to be elevated like her, and she condemns the Velvet Gang as "low-class, urban bitches," to which one of the members, when seeing Christie say it on TV, remarks that "urban bitches" sounds very early 2000s and dated.

    At one of the Metro Designers stores, one of the salespeople, Violeta (Eiza González) and her co-worker confront their boss Grayson (Will Poulter) about why their paychecks are so low, only earning $40 in a week after taxes. He is dismissive to them, keeps blasting loud club music to drown them out, and in between playing music says that the cost of the expensive Metro Designers outfits that they have to wear for work (and have to wear new ones for each season, as well as keeping with monthly monochromatic themes of the store, a la Emerald City in The Wiz) got taken out of their paychecks. Their lunch breaks are only 30 seconds, there is a high turnover rate of employees, and when the Velvet Gang get jobs at that store to steal inventory, Corvette realizes that Christie stole one of her fashion designs off her social media to pass off as her own. But before the Velvet Gang can pull off another heist, all the clothes get stolen in seconds while they are in a meeting with Grayson, and upon security camera footage, they see a young woman named Jianhu (Poppy Liu) sucking all the clothes into her bag, and they go, "She's got a magic bag!"

    The movie is delightfully weird and absurd, where the characters live in a strange world that is heightened reality. Christie Smith lives in a high-rise building that is tilted at a 30 degree angle, where the floor is so tilted that people can barely walk or balance on it, and in a scene when Corvette hides in a coffee cart to spy on Christie, she tries to sneak out and can barely scale the floor to the door before sliding back down.

    The film uses a lot of creative practical effects, like model cars for a car chase, stop-motion animation characters, and zooming back with Keke Palmer on a dolly track for big reactions.

    The film has a lot packed into it, and it feels like it's trying to be about different things: capitalism; labor strikes; artists' designs getting stolen by corporations; poor people being exploited; women of color being marginalized by rich white people; a science fiction teleportation and deconstruction device; unsafe factory conditions, etc. It can get overwhelming and not feel as tightly compact as Riley's previous film Sorry to Bother You, but it is a lot of fun to watch, and I liked how bold and colorful the film was combined with the practical effects. 

    Naomi Ackie was a delight to watch, who I've enjoyed in movies like Mickey 17 and Sorry, Baby, and I thought Eiza González was a scene-stealer and got a more interesting role than just being cast to be "sexy." And I like that after The Substance, Demi Moore is getting more into offbeat, weird films, and throws herself into this role as an awful person who has deluded herself into thinking she's uplifting people with her fashion.

    I really enjoyed this movie a lot, it's one of the standout movies of the year so far.

Thoughts on River

    On Tubi, I watched River, a 2023 Japanese sci-fi comedy directed by Junta Yamaguchi and written by Makoto Ueda. The film takes place in a old winter ryokan, or Japanese inn, in Kibune, outside of Kyoto. The lead character, the waitress Mikoto (Riko Fujitani), is standing by the Kibune river behind the ryokan, then goes back to work, cleaning up a table with the head waiter, but then finds herself back when she started at the river two minutes ago. She feels like this is deja vu, but when this happens for a third time, she and the waiter get confused, both experiencing the same feelings, and then the staff and guests, also being perplexed, realize that they are all stuck in a time loop that keeps repeating itself every two minutes. Their area is the only one affected, and as they are able to retain their memories and not have their mind reset every two minutes, they try to work together to solve the problem. 

    But as the resets keep happening, people start panicking, like two businessmen who are seated eating rice and getting sick of the rice and worrying they will eat it forever; a guest who was in the baths who keeps running out in just a towel with shampoo in his hair; and a novelist who is struggling with finishing his draft, at first welcoming the break but then becoming hysterical. 

    Each reset is filmed as one long take for two minutes, and the staff are frequently running up stairs and through corridors, or going to a separate inn building across the road, and given that they have such a short time before resetting, it's more stressful whenever someone figures out new information but wants everyone to meet in a particular place, where they may not have time to get there to hear everything before the loop happens again.

    I liked how this differed from other time loop films because it had more people stuck in the loop, as opposed to movies that usually have one or two people stuck in it and trying to figure things out and trying to act normal to others unaware of the loop. With everyone in the same predicament, and being able to remember things, it helps keep the story fresh by not repeating the same scene over and over again, with each scene being different based on the latest information they learned. The staff also still have to do their jobs and think of their guests, whether it's bringing in lukewarm sake to the businessmen because there wasn't enough time to make hot sake, or having the man in the baths coming out in a robe in the later scenes so he isn't half-naked in a towel around everyone.

    There is a romantic subplot between Mikoto and a young chef who are dating, and their story plays into Mikoto worrying that by her wishing by the river that it would stop flowing, like a way of stopping time, that she is responsible for the time loop, and she is trying to figure out a conflict with her boyfriend while also trying to end the loop. 

    It works well when everyone learns to be cooperative with each other and stops panicking, and the cause of the time loop circles back to a minor reference early on in the movie that pays off later in an interesting way. I heard of this movie from the Critically Acclaimed podcast, hosted by two film critics, William Bibbiani and Witney Siebold, and they did an episode in 2025 ranking the coziest movies ever made, and I thought this movie sounded really good, and luckily it was streaming on Tubi to watch. So I'm glad for their recommendation, this was a really interesting movie to watch.

Thoughts on Is God Is

     At the Village East Cinema in Manhattan, I saw Is God Is, a 2026 Southern Gothic revenge film written and directed by Aleshea Harris, adapted from her 2018 play of the same name. The film was co-produced by Tessa Thompson and Janizca Bravo, and stars Kara Young and Mallori Johnson as Racine and Anaia, twin sisters in their twenties who are covered in burn scars, Racine's scars along her left arm and Anaia's scars on her face and upper chest. They survived a domestic violence act as children when their abusive father (Sterling K. Brown) had broken his restraining order and came to their home, choking their mother (Vivica A. Fox) unconscious and setting her on fire in front of the girls, leaving the girls to be burnt in the attempt to save their mother. 

    The girls grew up believing their mother had died, and since their father had abandoned them, they were raised in a series of foster homes, ostracized and called ugly by everyone, especially Anaia because of her facial scars, and work as janitors in an office, applying ointment to each other as a daily ritual at home. Racine is the more outspoken, adventurous one, always defending her sister, while Anaia is more reserved and has a casual relationship with a boyfriend who doesn't want to look at her during sex. Racine often teases Anaia, calling her a "little bitch" in a way to mean she's a coward. The sisters are so close and intuitive with each other that they often exchange silent conversations with knowing looks, with the dialogue of their conversation appearing on the screen.

    Racine receives a letter from their mother, thought to be dead, and the twins travel to her home, where she is bed-ridden and taken care of by a team of healthcare aides, who braid her hair as she explains to them what happened. She tells them that she is dying, and that her deathbed wish is for the twins to avenge her by killing their father, for all the pain and suffering he has left behind, knowing he moved on with another woman and had more children. Their mother, who Racine calls "God" because she created them, convinces them out of their hesitancy by showing her legs to them, not visible to the audience but most likely burned beyond recognition. The sisters agree to their mother's wish, and set off to find their father to enact justice.

    The film is a road trip story, where the sisters encounter various characters who had been left hurt in their father's wake: an evangelical preacher named Divine (Erika Alexander) who is still devoted to their father even though he abandoned her while she was pregnant and her son, their half-brother, is now an adult; the lawyer Chuck Hall (Mykelti Williamson), a man who cannot speak anymore due to their father's violence, communicating by whiteboard, and pays a dominatrix to beat him to train him to be able to fight their father; and eventually their father's third family in the finale.

    I liked how this film was bright and loud and funny, while still being serious about all the abuse and pain and trauma that this one man caused to several Black women throughout his life, and how they felt denied in their revenge and anger, and wanting to see him suffer.

    Kara Young and Mallori Johnson are both excellent in the leads, with Young just popping off the screen as a charismatic star, and Johnson having a more reserved sensitivity to her performance. I liked seeing the supporting cast of well-known names (including Janelle Monae as their father's abused wife in a gilded cage), but Sterling K. Brown as their father was chilling, in playing the father with a soft voice but a psychopathic violence, excusing his past actions as "I was young and didn't know better," despite being an adult then and continuing to harm people on a path of destruction.

    I heard of this movie from a Bluesky tweet from the YouTuber Princess Weekes, who loved the film, and I'm glad I took her recommendation, this was a little gem of a movie.

Thoughts on Desk Set

    On Criterion last Sunday, I watched Desk Set, a 1957 romantic comedy directed by Walter Lang and written by Henry and Phoebe Ephron, adapted from the 1955 play of the same name by Walter Marchant. The movie centers on Bunny Watson (Katharine Hepburn), a documentalist who works in the reference department of a television network in Manhattan. She and the other librarians (Joan Blondell, Dina Merrill, Sue Randall) all answer phone calls from the general public asking about obscure trivia questions from their reference library, and the women have all memorized facts and can tell people things immediately, or know exactly what section the reference material it is in. The women have bonded with each other, and are close with other secretaries in the building, working like a network to look out for each other. 

    Methods engineer and efficiency expert Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy) comes in for a meeting with the boss Mr. Azae (Nicolas Joy), but arrives a day early for his appointment, so he spends time in the reference department, arising suspicion from the librarians. It is eventually revealed that Sumner has developed a giant computer system called Electromagnetic Memory and Research Arithmetical Calculator, with the acronym EMERAC, nicknamed "Emmy." He and Mr. Azae have been in talks to install the computer in the reference department, as a faster way of generating results from the public questions, and the librarians fear that this machine will replace them and put them out of work. This also made me think of the film Hidden Figures, where the women "computers" at NASA work as mathematicians but aren't valued, and a giant IBM computer in the 1960s threatens to replace them.

    Bunny is dating rising network executive Mike Cutler (Gig Young), but is frustrated that after seven years together, he hasn't proposed to her yet. Richard finds Bunny to be smart and captivating and is intrigued by her, especially when he interviews her about her ability to calculate facts and information very quickly, like asking questions about train arrivals and number of passengers at stops.

    I wasn't as into the romantic comedy parts of the movie, although I did like the scenes where Bunny impressed Richard with her sharp intelligence. But I was really into the scenes with her and her coworkers, like with Joan Blondell as being a co-leader with Bunny, with her older age and seniority, and I've always liked her as a great comedic actress of the 1930s. 

    As an archivist, I related a lot to the reference environment and being able to memorize random facts and niche trivia to ramble off to people, and was amazed at how prescient the film was with the librarians fearing that the computer would take over their jobs, like the fear today with A.I. being used to replace people in the tech industry and leading to massive layoffs.

    The finale, where Neva Patterson as Miss Warriner is trying to handle the phones and enter information into Emmy at the same time, and taking too long to deliver the answers and getting the wrong results from Emmy was hilarious, and an excellent scene of comedic acting from her, especially when she just freaks out on everybody out of sheer frustration, it was awesome.

    I really liked this film, and I had recognized the last name of the writers, and was correct in realizing they were the parents of the journalist/screenwriter/director Nora Ephron, who would reach mainstream fame with her romantic comedies Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail, and Julie & Julia, and writing the screenplays for When Harry Met Sally . . ., Silkwood, and Heartburn.

    This was a really good movie, and I'm happy I watched it.

Thoughts on Memoir of a Snail

     On Hulu, I watched Memoir of a Snail, a 2024 Australian stop-motion animated tragicomedy film written and directed by Adam Eliot. The film centers on a twin brother and sister, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Grace (Sarah Snook), who come of age in 1970s Melbourne, being separated by being orphaned in youth, and largely following Grace's life as a lonely misfit.

    The twins' mother had died in childbirth, and they are raised by their French father Percy (Dominique Pinon), who was once a juggler and street performer but is now a paraplegic alcoholic. Grace develops an affinity for collecting snails, which her late mother was fond of as well, and her brother protects her from bullies who tease her for her cleft lip. When their father dies from sleep apnea, the children are split into different foster families and separated on opposite ends of the country, with Grace in Canberra and Gilbert in Perth. Grace is raised by a nudist swingers couple who are kind but often absent to pursue their own adult lives, and Gilbert is raised by a Christian fundamentalist family who abuse him and force him to do grunt work of putting stickers on their apples for very little pay, which he is expected to give to the church collection jar weekly.

    Grace, while receiving letters from Gilbert and hoping to be reunited, makes friends with Pinky (Jacki Weaver), an eccentric and kind older woman who has lived a colorful life despite setbacks (both her husbands died by accident; she got fired from many jobs; she lost her pinky finger while dancing), and she becomes Grace's foster mother when her foster parents retire to join a nudist colony. She acts as a supportive rock for Grace, as Grace grows up and becomes an obsessive hoarder with her snails and snail-related collectibles, wearing a snail hat with eyes on wires on top.

   This film was incredibly touching to me. It has a very dark, weird, sepia-toned look to it, and it's a film meant for adults, not a children's film. As Grace and Gilbert grow up, they face more challenges and struggles, and I related a lot to Grace wanting to cocoon herself at home with her favorite things, especially as her trauma has kept her from really living her life. Pinky's words to her at the end of the film (Pinky dies as an old woman right at the beginning of the film, then the film starts at the twins' childhood to get to how Pinky came to be in Grace's life) really resonated with me:

    "No, I won't tell you the horrors I remember, but do want to tell you what it's like to feel imprisoned, caged. It was simply dreadful. But in the years since, I've learnt that the worst cages are the ones we create for ourselves. You have created a cage for yourself, Gracie. Your cage has never been locked . . . but your fears have kept you trapped . . . Start anew. A bit of self-pity's OK, but it's time to move on. There'll be pain, but that's life. You have to face it head-on. Be brave."

    The film was loosely based on Eliot's own life, and was Oscar-nominated for Best Animated Film. Eliot had won an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film for his 2003 short film Harvie Krumpet. The lead actors are great in the film, but especially Jacki Weaver, who was fantastic as Pinky and brings a lot of heart to this wonderful oddball character who acknowledges that life is hard, but doesn't want to dwell on looking backwards. She will help Grace by making comparisons to snails, saying that snails only move forward, and don't go backwards over their own paths.

    I'm glad I checked out this film, it was a strange little gem to watch.

Thoughts on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

    On Criterion, I watched The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, a 1972 West German New Wave psychological romantic film written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, based on his play of the same name. The film centers on the title character Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen), a fashion designer who lives in a luxurious apartment in Bremen, and the whole film takes place in the apartment. She is rich, very thin, and lounges around in gowns and wigs, ordering around her silent personal assistant Marlene (Irm Hermann), who keeps a taciturn expression.

    Petra is twice-married, her first husband having died in a car accident when Petra was pregnant with their daughter, Gaby, and she recently divorced her second husband because of his controlling nature. Through her cousin Sidonie (Katrin Schaake), she meets Sidonie's friend Karin (Hanna Schygulla), a young 23-year old woman, who just returned to Germany after having lived in Sydney for five years with her husband. Petra is immediately attracted to Karin, telling her she should be a model, and the two develop a quick relationship, with Petra offering to financially support her while she trains to become a model. They talk about their lives, Petra having grown up happy and comfortable while Karin came from a traumatic background. Petra projects an obsession onto Karin, being enraptured by her, while Karin is flattered by the compliments but doesn't feel the same for Petra.

    The film is more of a melodrama, and Petra's obsession with Karin does feel over-the-top, especially when she's only known her for a short time, but codependency is a big part of the story, as Petra feels lonely, often at home with Marlene at her beck and call, and clings to Karin's youth and beauty, despite that Petra herself is only 35 and still very beautiful and young herself.

    The film is set in the then-present of the 1970s, but has a 1930s look, with the women having short, styled hair, wearing cloche hats and long gowns, projecting more of a 1920s-1930s glamour to them, it did confuse me at first to figure out the time period of the story.

    I found Marlene more fascinating in her silence, especially when observing this doomed sapphic affair from a distance but unable to comment on it to stay professional, but judging it all the same.

    I liked the film, but the melodrama was too much for me, and made me talk back at the screen like, "C'mon, Petra, get it together" when she's moaning over wanting Karin to love her back or wanting her to return. It was a nice film to watch, but not really for me.