There shall be a fire that knows the naming of you

I was here for a scary alive office labyrinth movie. I was involuntarily tense for the whole first half (positive thing, I like it when a horror movie can scare me). I loved the exploration, the horrible laundry room, the student camera guy's ominous blood trail. Things flickering just out of sight. The backwards stop sign, the impossible furniture. The horrible plastic Christmas tree and whatever was in there with it. The creepy pool. I'm unabashed about liking this stuff despite being a vocal Liminalisms hater (none of you know what "liminal" means) because I literally feel psychologically and spiritually drained whenever I have to run an errand in the sprawl, dead malls make me want to rip my skin off, as much as I loved choir practice in middle/high school I was deeply haunted by the upstairs mall office spaces we practiced in and hated being in them with a vengeance, I have been known to yell at empty parking lots about how much they should be restored prairie and wetland, etc. What I want out of the horror is the absolute dead-eyed, windowless gaze of it. If there is a minotaur here it knows nothing of Crete, of islands and oceans, but only flickering fluorescents and hallucinatory exhaustion. Plaster and acoustic tiling hell forever. The certainty that if you ever find out what's going on here, it will immediately destroy you. Messily. And that mess will echo forever, somewhere in the rooms. And there will be no meaning to it but inorganic growth forever.

And then we timeskipped. I was here to watch Clark spiral, to watch him lose his mind and gain an understanding with the Scary Greature, or at least the cognitive distortions to make him think he'd gained an understanding. But we switch to Mary's POV and get none of that. She gets an (admittedly also shallow) schizophrenic mom backstory, and the alcoholic Black man with anger issues and narratively Less Severe Trauma gets a complete jump cut into Storing His White Woman Subordinate's Head In A Fridge (Literally???!?!?), Torturing Another White Woman, And Also The Big Bad Scary Greature Is (currently taking the form of?) His Mishappen Goofy Pirate Tulpa. And Then He Dies Badly ???????? It's not a sin for a horror protag to suck but if you look at all of that together it's not great. Racist at best and boring and jarring simultaneously at worst.

Maybe if I knew about the YouTube Lore I'd care about Phil (why is the guy from Creep here to act badly in 2.5 scenes btw) and Mary and the Secret uhhhhhh Organization i forgot it's name and also don't know why it's important that this guy made MRI machines btw and don't care.

I was here for a scary alive office labyrinth movie. I was involuntarily tense for the whole first half (positive thing, I like it when a horror movie can scare me). I loved the exploration, the horrible laundry room, the student camera guy's ominous blood trail. Things flickering just out of sight. The backwards stop sign, the impossible furniture. The horrible plastic Christmas tree and whatever was in there with it. The creepy pool. I'm unabashed about liking this stuff despite being a vocal Liminalisms hater (none of you know what "liminal" means) because I literally feel psychologically and spiritually drained whenever I have to run an errand in the sprawl, dead malls make me want to rip my skin off, as much as I loved choir practice in middle/high school I was deeply haunted by the upstairs mall office spaces we practiced in and hated being in them with a vengeance, I have been known to yell at empty parking lots about how much they should be restored prairie and wetland, etc. What I want out of the horror is the absolute dead-eyed, windowless gaze of it. If there is a minotaur here it knows nothing of Crete, of islands and oceans, but only flickering fluorescents and hallucinatory exhaustion. Plaster and acoustic tiling hell forever. The certainty that if you ever find out what's going on here, it will immediately destroy you. Messily. And that mess will echo forever, somewhere in the rooms. And there will be no meaning to it but inorganic growth forever.

And then we timeskipped. I was here to watch Clark spiral, to watch him lose his mind and gain an understanding with the Scary Greature, or at least the cognitive distortions to make him think he'd gained an understanding. But we switch to Mary's POV and get none of that. She gets an (admittedly also shallow) schizophrenic mom backstory, and the alcoholic Black man with anger issues and narratively Less Severe Trauma gets a complete jump cut into Storing His White Woman Subordinate's Head In A Fridge (Literally???!?!?), Torturing Another White Woman, And Also The Big Bad Scary Greature Is (currently taking the form of?) His Mishappen Goofy Pirate Tulpa. And Then He Dies Badly ???????? It's not a sin for a horror protag to suck but if you look at all of that together it's not great. Racist at best and boring and jarring simultaneously at worst. (ETA clarification: I understand that by that point we're probably looking at "a copy of a copy of a copy"--I just don't think it's earned.

Maybe if I knew about the YouTube Lore I'd care about Phil (why is the guy from Creep here to act badly in 2.5 scenes btw) and Mary and the Secret uhhhhhh Organization i forgot it's name and also don't know why it's important that this guy made MRI machines btw and don't care.