I don’t recall the last time I watched a movie, and thought that I want to watch it again in a few days.    That might be Begonia, with Emma Stone.

Even more rare is pausing a movie to think about the situation before seeing what happens.  The Martian comes to mind.

The premise for Backrooms is a mundane setting when, “hold on, what’s this? There’s an opening.” happens, requiring exploration and explanation.  It’s wondrous, but probably not as safe as it seems.

It’s not new, that’s Alice in Wonderland, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and a litany of other movies.  It may not even be a premise, but the justification for the premise.  Like if you insult an old crone, and she turns out to be a gypsy.  Something is going to happen, and it may get pretty dark.

Clark owns a discount furniture store.  That’s about as mundane as it gets.  Nobody is going to Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire to buy particle board furniture when Facebook Marketplace and IKEA exist.  Clark also has some emotional issues he’s working through with a therapist. 

In the basement of the store, Clark finds an entryway to an extra-dimensional space.  The space looks like empty commercial real estate.  Office corridors, rooms, doors and some furniture.

This is when I paused the movie.  The space didn’t look like it might hold hidden treasures, but a large area has potential for some good use.  Map it out, and see what you’ve got.  It reminded me of that Turkish guy who found a hidden, underground city when he knocked down a wall in his basement.

He found an abandoned underground city that was once home to 20,000 people.

The Turk went legit.  He reported it to authorities, and had permission to improve it to turn it into a tourist attraction.

As Clark starts exploring, it becomes obvious that this place doesn’t operate like the real world.  The movie started to feel like the TV show, Lost.  Because it’s a movie, and not a TV show, the viewer assumes that they can’t keep making up weird shit as they go, with no hope of ever tying up the loose ends.

There are many ways this spacial anomaly can be explained. 

In Lost, the island is explained as a kind of purgatory, where the characters were dropped after dying.  That’s how I understood it, and although that’s a spoiler, the show came out two decades ago.  It’s worth watching even though the series has an unsatisfying, bullshit resolution.

Purgatory would be an alternate plane of existence only accessible to the dead, but the backrooms could be an alternate dimension that other people are noticing, like in the TV show Stranger Things.. 

The backrooms could be a dream, manifestation of Clark’s emotional distress, or hallucinations of a dying man.  Or a fantasy state imposed by a powerful being, like in the TV show Wandavison.

The movie hints at some of those possibilities, but does come to a satisfying resolution.  Everything isn’t explained, but the nature of the anomaly is revealed. 

I liked the movie.  Clark was a bit frantic, but logical for a person unprepared for the situation.  People who assist Clark act in a plausible way.  I’d give it an 8.5 out of 10.