Review: BACKROOMS

Clark's not doing so well. His separation is grinding and his furniture business is winding down. In therapy, he complains about roleplay but returns to his anger with his wife as though he's still possessed by it. His shrink, Mary, is patient and quite indulgent but seems to be making little progress. One night (having been kicked out of home, he's sleeping in one the beds he hopes to sell), he notices the electrics going nuts again and, investigating, he spies a weird phenomenon: a thin line of light appears to be leaking through a wall that should have nothing behind it. He approaches it and falls right through it. On the other side is a huge yellow room with a messy stack of furniture and doors that lead to the same yellow carpet and wallpaper, a labyrinth of corridors and rooms variously empty or furished with sunken couches and tables that poke out halway from the walls. It seems endless. Welcome to the backrooms.

Clark reports this to Mary and describes it thus: imagine telling someone who has never seen a dog what it looks like and asking them to draw the description. Good analogy. One room might have a table and lamp and a series of decreasingly sized repeats. There could be a room with a pool. If you look up you might see long vents with tiny doorways that would open onto voids. If you see a figure in the distance think twice about greeting it; it could be a cutout with a radio or something animate and lethal.

Kane Parsons, director, did not create the Backrooms (nor claims such), they began as a photo of an anonymous yellow wallpapered corridor in 2019 on 4chan. Another 4chan-er responded:

"If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in

God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you"

This engendered a long and rich collective world building which appeared to describe the same infinity with added lore. Parsons, under his YouTube handle Kane Pixels, produced a series of situational and historical videos which, while not quite telling a story, follow a thread of discovery and investigation. His confident work caught the eye of the likes of James Wan and A24 and there it was this morning in front of me in a well stocked cinema.

As this is a feature film, a central narrative was struck in preference to the discontinuous episodic structure of Parsons' web series. This was what worried anyone familiar with at least the series. Would it get Hollywoodised? Well, it has been but tastefully. We get characters with motivations that lead us into the dreamlike claustrophobic setting and a progress through a conflict that is hampered by the unsettlingly dynamic realm.

Beyond that, Hollywood is left at the door and it's up to the audience to follow who, given just enough, will deliver the rest around the characters. The audience was a little fidgety which annoyed me through the ads (when they're allowed to be fidgety) but everyone shut up and paid attention at the prologue scene. Note to filmmakers who intend their work be shown in cinemas: start, Homer could have told you, in a crisis and add some conversation punching noise. You've got 'em.

I remember planning a joke for this review, considering the presence of a psychiatrist, that maybe this was what Jung's collective unconscious really is, the manufactured garbage of all of humanity, sinking into the floor of bland yellow office space. But the film kind of beat me to it as it progressed. Then, afterwards, when I went to do some shopping, the crowds and modern brutal architecture of the shopping centre felt like a VR experience augmenting the movie. 

When we see the outside world, we look at street scenes flattened by a long lens, rows upon rows of housing development boxes. Are we guilty, here? Are we dreaming this terrifying, smothering space into existance just form the way we expect to live? If the backrooms form a hell it is more like the one in Hellraiser than the Inferno, containg no sense of justice beyond the ill chance of its discovery.

If you were curious about whether to see the YouTube series first, I'd advise against it. Go in as uninformed as the characters in this film. Then, try the series for at least Parsons' background. As the story in this movie is just one slice of the possible lore, sequels are almost inevitable and I'd see them all if they only sought to explore different slices.

Oh, there has been scuttlebutt about Parson's getting assistance in his direction. He was twenty when this film was finished. He was a teenager when he made the web series. Anyone who doubts this age range is capable of this kind of work should try to remember for themselves. At twenty, you can be sitting on a tram and conjuring worlds. It's not the age of the artist but the art in the daydreamer, and there's plenty here.

Review: SHELBY OAKS

A group of online paranormal investigators meet disaster on their final assignment at an abandoned prison. All but one of their bodies is found, leading the sister of the missing woman to start her own investigation. After a bombarding montage of the case a violent incident sees the film itself change from a found footage with interviews mockumentary (like Lake Mungo or Horror in the High Desert) into a much slicker conventional feature film. That's about twenty minutes in. It's so smooth a change that revealing it does not constitute a spoiler. It's more a soft serve bait and switch. Apart from some extra video footage soon after the turn, this is now a normal mainstream movie.

That was the main gripe of audiences who have responded against the film, it felt dishonest. The other gripe is a tall poppy cull. The writer/director Chris Stuckmann has spent years creating a lot of good will as a YouTube film critic, offering solid appraisals of the titles he reports on, whether good orf bad. That changed in the last few years as people were noticing his reviews were almost entirely positive. He addressed this in a video, saying he was fed up trash talking film makers, omitting the word other and then this feature film appeared. 

Personally, I don't care about that nor care for tall poppyism. Is the movie any good? Well, that's the sticking point: it isn't. Charges of over derivation are meaningless in a genre film, all of them come from a tradition that is recognisable; it's part of why we like them. Shelby Oaks is not a good horror film because it never feels quite right.

But what is a budding filmmaker to do, offer up yet another found footage fest after deacdes of them? Why not, if he's good enough at it? I think the problem lies in how the bulk of the running time doesn't match the promise of the opening montage and first act where Mia's action is sparked and the hunt is on. It doesn't play convincingly as a conventional film because audiences are throwing popcorn at the screen by the time Mia decides on a whim to investigate the freezingly creepy prison by herself at the witching hour. No justification given, she's set on it and does it. This is not the story killing argument of why the kids in the Evil Dead cabin don't just turn around and go back to town. Mia could easily have waited, asked her husband to come along and do it by the light of day. It's almost as if someone is saying: aw come one, you want to know, too? Sure we do, but you could have made a daylight trip a lot scarier than the cliche one.

On cliche, the house in the woods we do get to only ever feels fake with black mould that looks art directed rather than organic, a CG hell hound that never quite works, and the kind of nasty hick monster that Barbarian already did in a game changing way years before (and with refreshing complexity). The remainder of the tale drags its points so agonisingly that the audience is already at the finishing gate by the time of the final shot. 

I'm not here to trash talk a good critic but rather to sadly admit that not all of the YouTube brats come through with a Talk ro Me or an Obsession, nor do all the talented streamer filmmakers break through (Isaac Rodriguez, anyone?) Stuckmann's high profile on online outlets just gave him further to fall and, as far as this film has gone, the fall has lingered and the landing must have been painful. I will admit to wincing when I saw the credit of Mike Flanagan in a production role. I like him as a cine-thinker but have only found his work trope ridden and unimpressive. Is this the same operation as the final moment of Paranormal Activity that was so goofy it all but erased the good scares of the rest of the filim? Id it why Poltergeist looked and felt more like Spielberg than Tobe Hooper? I don't know. I will say that there is just enough here to warrant another chance. Just enough. 

Review: HOKUM

A prologue features a conquistador and a small boy seeking something in a vast desert. This leads to a moment of desperation where the conquistador is driven to extreme violence. Through intercutting we learn that this is happening in the mind of an author trying to finish a trilogy of novels. He's liberally sipping whiskey and trembling from too many years of doing that. A noise in the house distracts him and he sees a figure in the darkness of a stairwell that vanishes with light directed at it. It reminds him to care for the ashes of his parents.

So, it's off to Ireland where they honymooned and the hotel where they stayed. The near petrified owner, Cobb, interrupted in quietly scaring two children with the story of the witch that haunts the place lets the skepitcal American writer, Ohm Bauman, that he's in for the reverse of fun and games. Which ensue.

Damian McCarthy's third feature packs a fair bit of his previous two but this time minus the quirk-forward approach. If I call this his most mainstream film so far I only really mean that it was made for the kind of distribution it has won, chain cinemas instead of festival venues and specialist streamers. That this $5 million movie has so far made five times that sounds like a winning gamble. 

If that sounds like I'm calling sellout, I should also point out that Hokum is a far richer cinematic experience than any genre film made for the many times its budget. We are witnessing the rise of a generation of new filmmakers who cut their teeth on YouTube and emerge with first features that play like veteran cinema. McCarthy's films don't ;ook like theirs . he's much more along the lines of the artsy indy crew of Peter Strickland and Joanna Hogg with a clear lean toward horror. Hokum looks and sounds like lush budgeted Stephen King adaptation but with an art house sensibility, as though James Wan ditched the jump scares and went broody.

If casting Adam Scott was a cynical use of a well known and beloved American leader it's also astute as he plays the hell out of his character without a second's stylistic frisson between him and the rest of the cast. He works. He works against and with the quirk, acquites himself in action sequences and carries the developing horror with his character's melancholy.

I'll mention the score here as it really stands up. A sequence that starts with a fire alarm progresses to the manipulation of that portamento tone until it is a musical motif. I normally notice such a thing as it's happening. The combination of action and scene changes obscured this shift until it had been playing that way for minutes.

So, the rising director who seemed destined for the eternal arthouse broke through. Unlike Gareth Edwards whose strong and resourceful Monster led him to the popcorn epic Godzilla or Rob Savage whose canny COVID horror Host brought forth the deflation of The Boogeyman, McCarthy at least has stepped into the mainstream with something that still looks like his own work. While my tastes still prefer his middle feature Oddity, despite all about it that doesn't quite work, this is the one I'd choose to introduce him to someone unfamiliar. If he can make the good bits of his approach the things that make him a living, he'll join Coralie Fargeat and Jordan Peele in the stronger corner of the mainstream. Perhaps he needs to keep to his native Ireland to keep that sweet. I'd be in the queue for that.

Review: OBSESSION

Bear loves Nikki and he's shy about it. Nikki doesn't know or won't show. He buys her a novelty gift, a wish trinket which he's too awkward to give to her but uses it himself. An emotional maelstrom explodes that not only pays back the wish but takes Bear to the nightmare at the other end of his obsession. This movie plays rough.

Wish stories are about as old as speech because the motive is. The three wish model operates like this: first one proves the power, the second is disastrous and the third undoes the second. Curry Barker, whose YouTube hit Milk and Serial (please watch it) punched above its weight at serial killer and found footage movies, is only interested in the first wish and puts it in the hands of an emotionally vulnerable person who won't be able to handle even a mild granting of it.

If Nikki swung on her heel and rapped on the passenger seat of his car professing boundless love it would be an 'eighties black  comedy. The Gen Zeds in this story have already streamed those movies. The one they play is tougher and scarier. There are laughs but most of it is constantly unsettling as people who are not prepared to have their wishes granted face an earthly torment.

Milk and Serial puts a lot of plot into an hour of running time. Obsession runs forty minutes longer. Apart from moments when I felt this was staying too long on its plateau I understood why the plot is meagre by comparision for more screen time. Barker and crew's film craft is impeccable but his real purpose here is to bring his notion to life through rigourous performance.

This is Inde Navarette's film. Her Nikki handles fast and often dense dialogue as though it were occuring to her in the moment and her physicality is played against appearance. A prolonged smile goes from funny to unnerving. Her vocal riches take her from a sweet young woman to a banshee. Speaking from the corner shadows, moving into light and retreating from it while speaking violence as though it were mundanity renders a tired horror trope fresh. She is a monster.

But she is a monster created by a boy in a man's body, one to whom the idea of commanding allconsuming love from another might seem a throwaway notion but is too ill-equipped to think it through. This is his obsession, not Nikki's; she's its victim. One of the threads in this tale is consent, a thing that vanishes with anythning resembling a wish. Bear is old enough to know; he restrains himself from taking advantage of the situation at first but only at first. This film has the fortitude and depth to keep Nikki scary but identifiably wronged.

Curry Barker is one of the generation of YouTube brats who have plied their craft and had it tested in the unforgiving public arena online and made first features that look like the work of veterans. It occured to me that the power of the narrative and the naturalness of the yojng adults in it was reminiscent of the teenagers in Talk to Me by the Philipou brothers. We'll be seeing more cinema arrived at by this route. It's already feeling fresher than the general fare and carries a sense of daring. With the cinema sound system blaring out the rumbles and drones of this movie's electronic score and the odd aspect ratio a noticeably claustrophobic 1.50: 1, this is a movie made and presented on its own terms. All that and it's good. Really good.

Viewing notes: I saw this in a Hoyts cinema with recliners and beds. I have a lumbar region that whinges about recliners but also a thick beanie that serves as support. The beds were understandably poepled by couples. There were two: one kept the talking to whipers, the other enjoyed the freedom to pollute the darkness of the auditorium with phone screen light. Neither bothered me that much, the well attended session was one were the audience were with the movie which always feels good. I'd seriously consider getting this film on physical media if it appears post cinema.

Review: UNDERTONE

Evie spends her days tending to her near-comatose mother at home and holding up her half of a podcast of the paranormal (with her as the skeptic). The episode in progress with Justin sounds intriguing: he's been sent ten audio files of sketchy origin. As they go through the files, they start finding anomalies in the audio. Bumps, whispers, phrases in strange languages. This last gets the two chatting about backmasking and they find examples in certain nursery rhymes which leads to the discovery in one of the files of a phrase that might be a key to something very nasty. Against time, they need to find as much about that as possible. Will they make it?

Ian Tuason's feature debut from his own screenplay is a weave of themes and uses remoteness as the spur. This is essential. It means that, in the end, Evie must first accept the supernatural explanation and then fight against its source by herself in small town Canada, with Justin in distant London incapable of helping.

Meantime, we get a lot of convincing of Evie who counters Justin's credulity with reason and doubt. She has to experience in herself. This is done in measured doses and forms a strong thread throughout. She's not easily won over but she is under the greatest threat. The recordings are by a man of his wife to prove to her that she talks in her sleep. A childless couple, the woman starts speaking about saving children and some of the strange utterances she makes are decoded to reveal an ancient spirit intent on causing miscarriages or, though possession, infanticides. In the second act, Evie confirms that she is pregnant. That's as spoilery as I'm going to get. 

This is mostly managed with conventional horror cinema grammar: use of darkness, odds between what audiences see and characters don't. While the direction stays on the right side of bombast (this, thankfully, does not play like the James Wan dross that the trailer promised), this film hangs on performance. Nina Kiri gives us a dynamic young woman who can sublimate her various guilts and stresses behind a self-preserving persona. We get a good indication that she takes great comfort in her rationality. The quiet voice-only performance of Justin (played by Adam DiMarco) serves as a solid counter.

If there are flaws they lie in the use of creaky tropes. The house, clean but shadowy, does not need the exaggerated Dutch tilts to make it more sinister. A counter is a moment in which a light is switched on in an adjoining room. What makes it genuinely eerie is the sound of the switch clicking. It's slight but audible, reminding us that it needs to be thrown by a finger. What we don't need is the trope of chorusing the dialogue of the demonic world with pitched-down voices mixed in. This is as old as The Exorcist. It was, and remains, powerful there. In 2026 it just sounds old hat (not ancient, mind you, just old). All of the instances where a voice is thickened this way would have been a lot more effective as the original voices alone, speaking as normal.

In a film as carefully sound-designed as this (and it is brilliantly worked), you would think that one extra stretch away from conventionality might have suggested itself but, no, it's just the old trick brought out again. This and the events of the very end feel like rushed decisions and I can forgive them in a first timer's movie. I do know that Tuason is slated for the next Paranormal Activity franchise entry and can only hope he brings the better moments of restraint to that. Then again, I know what happened to that franchise. Anyway, let's end on that: hope.

Oh, the concept of a patron saint of cursed women, given as it is here, without irony, is an ignorant nonsense.

Viewing Notes: as all the new horror movies are having tiny cinema airings before being sucked into the void of streaming, I was forced to rent this through an online provider. Happily, the beaufitul UHD image and surround mix came through and it was a pleasure to view.

NAKED LUNCH @ 35

Bill Lee stopped writing early and got a gig as a bug exterminator. He calls it the best job he's ever had but he keeps running out of spray powder. Taking a lead from his beatnik pals, he catches his wife Joan injecting it into her breast. It's a literary high, she says, kind of a Kafka jag. Then, after a series of strange encounters with cops and talking oversized beetles, market stalls selling dried centipedes, he reminds his wife that it's time they did their old William Tell routine. She balances a glass on her head and he takes a shot at it with a .38. The glass rolls over the floor intact and Joan lies on the carpet with a bullet hole in her forehead. When a monstrous figure in a bar tells him to get a ticket to Interzone and send back reports from there, he goes.

Naked Lunch was always almost a movie from its publication onward but there are problems in the book that, depending on when the scripts were attempted, made it unfilmable. It could be seen variously as pornographic, ultraviolent, thickly surrealistic and dense. Burroughs' novel moves between lucid muscular narrative and arcane weirdness that continues and will continue to daunt the casual reader. What Cronenberg did was make a companion text.

This is a quilt formed from selected passages in the novel, biographical details of Burroughs' life in Tangier and in New York among the beats, as well as anything he could cull from other works like Junkie, Exterminator and Queer. Through this, Cronenberg threads a loose narrative centred on Burroughs' guilt over the killing of his wife and this forms a number of loops in which the act and its consequences repeat for a person who could never quite outrun them. Add the figure from the novel of Dr Benway, both sympathetic to and contemptous of the addicts in its world. Fascimiles of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg appear as sympathetic companions. Bill Lee moves through this, observing wryly, sharing blackly comic anecdotes, receiving overloads of psychic and sexual information.

This never quite fulfils the brief of a movie version of the book but it works best if you already know the book and would be effective as a spur to attempt a read. As a filmmaker Cronenberg had to clear the things that were literature and render unto cinema audiences the things that created a character to follow. Peter Weller plays Bill Lee as a taciturn wanderer, unfazed by the worst his life can deliver, delivering his lines as though he were spinning them from corroded copper, not quite caring if everyone hears them. It's the speech of the literate junkie, from the only imaginable centre of the universe. Weller pulls this off enough to keep screen centre with enough substance for us to try to make sense of everything around him. The great grace of his performance, though, is his evident refusal or agreement with Cronenberg, not to do the Burroughs voice. This party trick of everyone who ever went through a beat phase was a craw-sticking feature of the Kill Your Darlings biopic of Ginsberg a few years back, making the thirty year old Burroughs sound like he was eighty. Weller just finds Bill Lee, bowing to Bill Burroughs as the creator, not the entirety.

Judy Davis gives us a female counterpoint to Bill Lee, her New York version weary and in search of kicks, and her Interzone version more guarded, more worldly with an understanding of the dangers of Lee's influence. Both are nuanced and sexy as well as unsettling. Ian Holm's Paul Bowle's facsimile is solid but more a presence than a player. Michael Zelniker and Nicholas Campbell as the Ginsberg and Kerouac stand-ins are fun. It is Roy Scheider, though, who steals his every scene as the forbidding and funny Dr Benway. You'll remember him as much as Weller and Davis for his few minutes of screen time.

Because Cronenberg was prevented from shooting in Tangier by the first Gulf War, he improvised and went to the opposite end of the spectrum and made everything look like a set. The wall to wall magic hour golds and reds are pure tungsten lights and give the scenes an extra sting of oppressive delerium. 

Naked Lunch is a film about writing the same way that the book is a novel about literature. Writing is an art of the mind, constructed from thoughts that form and take life while walking dogs or doing dishes, the act of writing when that's done, has none of the physical theatre of music or painting. Cornenberg's brief was a tough one. I don't think it works entirely but I also admit that it wasn't made to be witnessed in isolation.

I failed to finish Naked Lunch three times before I stumbled on the solution: read it among noise. Just after I moved to Melbourne, I would go on tram trips to anywhere to familiarise myself with the system but also the speech and mood of the locals. I packed my Fontana paperback into a jacket pocket and took it out on a particularly long journey and found, finally, between shutting out the noise and letting it blast, that the strange prose on the pages started to have cadence and flow. A similar thing happened a few years earlier when I heard the Birthday Party single Release the Bats just enough times, having gleefully celebrated and ridiculed its chaos, to realise it was a tightly constructed rock song. A few more trams to wherever and I finished the book.

In case that puts you off there is a very good documentary that could bridge Cronenberg's film and Burroughs' novel. Burroughs: the Movie from 1983 is a terrific warts 'n' all account, narrated by Burroughs himself of his life and work with a wealth of footage from his younger life and various collaborations. Criterion have released this at one time which might point to it being trackable by several means.

Until then or you find a copy of the book, you can see this film. Take Bill Lee's advice and exterminate all rational thought and take this in

Review: ALPHABET LANE

Young couple Jack and Anna trade the bustle of Sydney for the serenity of the country. Life is tolerable with only each other for company but the sense of isolation swells up between them. They work at different phases of the day which further complicates things. One day, driving home, Jack passes an old timer on a horse and delivers the experience to Anna like he's brought home a boquet of flowers for her. He says he stopped and talked with the man, calling him Joe. Anna, at first incredulous, twigs and plays along. Soon, the pair are living through their imagined extra family, sending letters from Joe and his wife Michelle to each other. Things are about to get strange.

Or they would if this meaty premise had been served with a stronger screenplay. The Chekov rifle, here, is the breaking of the folie a deux by outside influences demanding explanation. This could lead to Hitchcockian tension but, instead, we get a dragging repetition where the new details and attempted complications are just absorbed by the pair and never strongly challenged by anyone who might. A very late third act decision seals this but without satisfying resolution.,

I kept wondering if this was a kind of minimalist thriller but kept coming up against a problem. Jack and Anna have clearly demonstrated flaws but these seldom compel palpable hazard. The suggestion of infidelity cannot sustain the audience's knowledge that Jack and Anna are writing to each other through the fantasy characters. If they were really concerned, they'd tap out and call it. Or, delving further into the shared madness, raise the conflict to more serious stakes. But that doesn't happen. Ever.

The emotional beats are soft and the points of crisis gentle. This pair of amiable young people, having brewed an explosive, relationship-annihilating potion, seem ok with just sipping on it. When one or other introduce serious developments in the agreed narrative, the tension is not there to play it through and they just deflate back to acceptance.

Because there is so little opportunity taken with the potential of this scenario, the appreciably short eighty minutes of screen time feels much longer. This is not the fault of the performances: the compliance scene alone when Jack persists with his invention until Anna understands and runs with it, is strongly played, believable and charming. Between that and the odd point of breakage in the third act it feels like it's coasting. This is emphasised by the pleasant but formless score of humming vocal harmonies and the soporific pacing which increasingly makes the film feel like a short film in the guise of a feature. 

I was reminded of Peter Carey's A Happy Story. There are no similarities in plot but the sense that compliance might lead to discovery in a relationship is a potent recall. It's worth noting that the Carey piece is a short story. I wish I could speak better of this attempt at an interesting premise and say more than praise its impressive use of its location but it just kept disappointing me. I kept thinking, this needs to feel real. Then the credits rolled.