hiiiiiiiii

My mother's life hangs by a thread, and I can only watch as time slips away without being able to do enough to save her. We still urgently need $500 to cover the treatment she has been waiting for. Please, if you are able to help, don't put it off. Every moment that passes fills me with fear that we may lose her before she gets the chance to receive the care she needs. I am begging everyone with compassion in their heart to help us today. No donation is too small, your kindness could bring my mother one step closer to the treatment she desperately needs and give our family hope when we need it most.

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!