‘Backrooms’ and ‘Obsession’ review: Strange hallways and warped desire

Backrooms

Credit where credit is due: In Backrooms, director Kane Parsons creates an expansive and intriguing hidden world.

Like Jordan Peele’s Us, this film posits a netherworld beneath the America We Know. Parsons’ is an endless series of winding, sepia-tinged corridors, ritualistic structures, multi-directional doors, and nefarious chutes.

I was captivated by the stretches of Backrooms where people explore these haunting liminal spaces. Parsons’ steady, roving camera movements prove quite hypnotic; when combined with first-person sequences shot by one character holding a video camera, the aesthetic contrast is thrilling and suspenseful.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that nearly everything else in this movie fell flat for me, and there is unfortunately a lot more that happens besides people entering secret rooms beneath a California furniture store.

Any time people sit and talk, which they do far too much, Backrooms comes to a grinding halt. The dialogue is stilted and on-the-nose, and nearly every character feels cringingly schematic.

There’s a drunken businessman (Chiwetel Ejiofor) whose store contains a invisible door to the backrooms; the rooms are an allegory for his addiction, you see. He has a therapist (Renate Reinsve), whose primary function is to bring out his ham-handed backstory while concealing her own. And then there’s a mysterious observer (Mark Duplass) who has access to security cameras placed in these rooms. His story would’ve been better off unexplained, but alas.

None of these people were compelling to me, and Ejiofor is the only one given any material that’s interesting to work with. I wish his wide-eyed wonder and terror as he roams unending surreal hallways were the movie’s most enduring image, but unfortunately there’s a bafflingly amateurish-looking creature that surfaces toward the end that overshadowed everything I liked in the first half.

Still, like I said, this premise shows promise. With a different screenwriter and more compelling characters, I’d sign up for another trip through these strange hallways.

Backrooms is currently playing in theaters.

Obsession

Curry Barker’s Obsession lives and dies by the towering performance at its center.

Inde Navarrette does something incredibly difficult as Nikki, the film’s object of warped desire. She conveys layers of psychic torment and rage beneath the tragic Manic Pixie Dream Girl ideal that the main character imposes on her.

That character, Bear (Michael Johnston, more of a twink), comes across an enchanted “One Wish Willow” at a new age shop. He uses his wish to make Nikki, his coworker at an electronics store, “love him more than anyone else in the world.”

Barker’s film balances pitch-black comedy with grotesque horror, finding amusing and often shocking conceptual angles with a premise that at first seems decidedly one-note. He proves himself a good director of actors and an often sharply funny writer, but Obsession suffers from a modern cinematic aversion to good or even adequate lighting. Even in a darkened theater, I sometimes struggled to make out things that were clearly meant to be visually legible.

Still, there’s a lot to parse over in this film, even if it offers little in the way of visual inspiration. Johnston’s Bear bears a striking similarity, both physically and temperamentally, to the Sensitive Nice Guy protagonists of a Cooper Raiff film, though crucially, Barker has a much more cynical and unsympathetic take on that character.

Though he never says “Nice guys always finish last,” you can tell that’s Bear’s guiding ethos. His wish is meant to subjugate, to turn Nikki into an endlessly adoring, uncritical girlfriend. Don’t call her Ruby Sparks.

As with many stories about people granted wishes, Bear did not think this through. Sure, the sex is great and they spend all their time together, but Nikki’s single-minded devotion to him soon wears thin and eventually turns into all-consuming, well… you know the title.

On the days when they aren’t working together, Nikki waits by the door for hours waiting for Bear, pissing and shitting herself rather than miss his return. At night, she sometimes lurks in the corner and watches him sleep.

Some of the film’s most effective scares involve Nikki’s true self breaking back through to the surface, screaming “It’s not me!” or pleading for things to end.

A lesser actress would have been detrimental here; Navarrette has a masterful balance of control and spontaneous fury. In a film of few memorable images, the close-ups of her demented grins and frowns linger.

Obsession is currently playing in theaters.

Matt Erspamer is a writer and movie lover who lives in Seattle.

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Any views or opinions expressed in this letter are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Watershed Voice staff or its board of directors.