Life's Too Mysterious - Dont Take It Serious!

"youtuber movie" connotation in 2026: generally well produced and terrifying horror movie

me: Are you fucking kidding me Larius I told you to do that outside, now it's gonna smell like ass in here all day

my elf roommate: *puffs a perfect ring of smoke* What Is A Day In A Life That Lasts Centuries?

me: not everybody lives as long as you dude. put that thing away

my elf roommate: That Is Not What Thy Mother Said

me: hilarious

The performances by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve are so. so good! I think they played characters who feel this kind of existential dread that draws them to the unknown very well. My gripe comes in with the optics from a racialized lens of Chiwetel's character and nuance not being as present in the writing.

Coming off of Is God Is has gotten me aglow with joy over mentally ill black people being the film protagonists!!! And in a way Backrooms does that as well. But the character ultimately "Clark" is ultimately written to be a misogynist in a dead end job with little interiority beyond that. It wouldn't be so apparent if he wasn't the only black man in the film, and if he didn't become an antagonist in the second act, antagonising Renate Reinsve's character, his white woman therapist, "Mary."

The narrative external to the backrooms becomes a story about a black man who's unable to change from being fundamentally angry and violent who's just unable to be helped by the caring white therapist (who is not on some melfi timing fr she was dogs hit but also a therapist who sold VHS tapes so character accurate perhaps?). Over the course of the film, we see these two roleplay out scenes of domesticity, with Mary pretending to be Clark's Ex-Wife who's also a white woman!

@ghomanimation first of all, thank you for telling me this! Second, WHAT THE FUCK?