The Backrooms Movie Analysis - The Monsters We Make

The opening weekend of Kane Parsons’ The Backrooms made over $260 million on a $10 million budget, beating a Star Wars film that opened the same weekend. Parsons, at 20 years old, became the youngest director ever to have a number one box office movie. Wendigoon, who visited the set in Vancouver and attended the premiere, argues that the film works not because it explains the Backrooms lore, but because it makes the Backrooms itself the central character—a place that copies human memories and loops them forever, getting worse each time.

Two characters, one loop

The film’s story follows two protagonists who function as foils for each other. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) runs a failing furniture store and dresses as a pirate-sultan hybrid for local TV ads. He wanted to be an architect, but his bitterness at his situation has curdled into anger, and he blames his wife Barbara for his stalled life. Mary (Renate Reinsve) is his therapist. She grew up with an agoraphobic mother who was eventually committed, and she became a therapist partly to process that trauma—an outlet that turns her pain outward toward helping others, rather than inward toward resentment.