You Don't Get Liminal Space And Neither Does Backrooms Spoilers

*Lots of spoilers*

So, a lot of people LOVED Backrooms.

Like, love loved it.

Like, the movie could do no wrong loved it.

I, on the other hand, was sat in my blue-leather theatre seat wracking my brain for what possible reason someone might think this was the absolute best movie to exist.

Or, that this was a REALLY good movie– that also felt like a stretch.

Where was the story? Honestly? Yes, I get it. The director is twenty, and it's a great film aesthetically, but I'm calling a spade a spade. Age does not let you get away with bad writing. Not in my books. #isaidwhatisaid

The Actual Lore

There was a paper I read years ago that considered the effects of liminal spaces on identity. For instance, a hallway would be considered a liminal space because it was a room that had no set identity or purpose other than to transition one person to a different room. A person walking through that room, therefore, would also have no set identity. Instead, they would be in a state of transition or transformation. The paper considered what happened to identity when it was in these rooms. What role do you perform when there is no set role? Who are you when you are in a state of transition?

This was the mindset I was in when I started watching the movie. I thought that the horror of the movie would be the confrontation of Clark's "other" or alter ego, the side of him that he rejected and shoved aside. Or, I thought that it would become a metaphorical transition into his worst self, like we see him slowly descend into madness.

After some real life complaining about the lacklustre effect of the movie and how it failed my expectations, I was dutifully guided to a re-education of liminal space on a strange website called 4chan. Here, and through a bunch of Youtube videos, which I've linked below, I learned about the backstory of backrooms.

"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 endless background noise of fluorescent lights and maximum hum-buzz, the madness of mono-yellow, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in." - 4chan quote

Social media defines liminal space much more differently than how I originally understood it. For those of you who don't know, the inception of Backrooms all began on a website called 4chan where someone asked for a picture of a room that felt nostalgic but creepy. In response, someone posted a picture of an old, abandoned basement/office space, the one that we see in the movie as well, with the dull yellow walls and carpeted floors. This led to a whole discussion on liminal space, which I feel more closely relates to the definition of the word "uncanny". It is about a space that feels uncomfortable, nostalgic but unsettling.

Before the movie, there was the original webseries that Kane Parsons created using Blender. This series brought to life the actual image posted on 4chan, where a character explores the rooms and discovers various creatures and horrors within. Of course, so far deep in my research, I watched a few episodes to see what it was about. If you're curious, you can check the show out here:

Did learning about the webseries and original images change my opinion on the movie? Not really, unfortunately, although I really wanted it to. I think the main argument against my perspective was that the lore explained the movie better, what with the noclipping, the alleged time-travelling, and the backstory of the rooms themselves. I'm not sure if that is true. There is a lot of lore, don't get me wrong, and the whole concept is really cool, but I don't think it accounts for the gaps in the movie.

Clark, Pirate Clark, and the Backroom

The movie Backrooms sticks to the social media definition of liminal space closely, really focusing on curating anxiety and discomfort through the set design and camerawork. The backrooms look familiar and eerie by nature, like an abandoned basement, or office space that everyone at some point in their life has encountered. With these kinds of physical liminal spaces, ones that are drenched in a state of timelessness, that are uncanny, that are barren of any specific identity, eliciting fear is easy because it is both familiar and inherent. I felt like a child again, forced to explore the unfinished basement of my childhood home where the laundry machines were. Every corner, every shadowy space contained some unknown monster. I didn't need any real, tangible monster to feel freaked out. I was internally begging Clark to leave the store immediately when he first discovered the rooms because the empty space elicited so much discomfort.

However, to claim that this movie only delves into the social media definition of liminal space undermines the rest of the movie. There is a story here. It's Clark's. It's Mary's. Both of these narratives hint at an exploration of architectural and psychological understanding of liminal space. The only issue is that the movie is not quite able to pull out that thread.

So, we get Clark, furniture store owner who's still reeling from what is alluded to be a messy divorce. He's not doing well. His store's not doing well. He's seeing this therapist and they roleplay the last argument he had with his ex-wife, and things don't look resolved at all, at least not on Clark's end. He's burnt out, angry with the whole world, and entirely alone.

On an evening sleeping and drinking at the store, Clark discovers the backroom.

It's important to note that the movie introduces the backrooms in the beginning through found footage. Supposedly, another scientist has gotten lost inside of the maze, the ominous monster takes over in the background. Creepy stuff. Then, the camera reveals that there is this whole study happening in the backrooms and that everything inside is being recorded.

This is where the movie lost me. Having the background science experiment made no sense to the rest of the story, which felt so much more metaphorical and ungrounded in reality. The very essence of noclipping, for instance, in this movie, made the experience of the backroom feel like a psychological experience specific to Clark. Everything in the backrooms was attached to Clark's psyche, from the blueprint, to the people inside, to the chairs, and even the big monster itself. It was all Clark. The scientist MRI corporation subplot had nothing to do with anything. In the end, they couldn't even use it as a way to explain the rooms either. All it did was take time away from what we could have gleaned about Clark's journey.

A prime example of this actually happening is when we get shots of the main scientist, Phil, seeing Clark on screen or watching the happenings of the backrooms in his secret lab. Prior to this, we had Clark scrambling around the maze, realizing that something ominous was happening here. Instead of giving us context as to what Phil was feeling, or focusing on Clark's revelations (or degradation into madness), we get these two random shots that don't give enough information about anything. I'd argue that making the backrooms a science experiment takes away from the abstract nature of liminal space. All of a sudden, everything that was set up for Clark's emotional journey no longer means anything. It's controlled by a larger institute, rather than being something that feels inherently so personal and smaller in scope.

The same thing happens in the end, when Clark's therapist, Mary, shows up in the backrooms. Instead of building on the relationship between them, or to their respective pasts, the movie just shoves the two characters by happenstance together. Clark emerges as a full-fledged villain, which left me so confused. When did that happen and why? How much time passed in the backrooms? Like what happened to Clark?

Of course, the movie never provides any answers. We get a few more super cool scenes, but what becomes abundantly clear is that nobody, including the writer, knows what the backrooms really is. This gap in the narrative dulls the horror in the movie as well; the Pirate monster thing shows as some manifestation of who Clark is, but it's so distant and unimportant to Clark's journey that there is no real shock when he takes and eats Clark. The same thing with the scalping scene. What is his motivation, really? Nobody knows. What does this have to do with the backrooms? Nothing except for the fact that he randomly found it and for some inexplicable reason, wants to stay. Don't even get me started on the assistants. Everything in this felt like a prop used merely for shock factor than anything else, and the frustrating part was that the story was right there!

That was the same gap I noticed in the web series, too. There was too much unknown about the backrooms, which isn't an issue unless you write a movie about a specific, slightly unhinged character, and his slightly incompetent therapist with a traumatic background where the rooms become somewhat symbolic. When Clark entered the backrooms (in the movie not the series), he was also locked in a state of liminality. This was his trauma come to life. His rejected self being formed and transformed and created and recreated within the unexplored halls. Too much of the movie had already established that it was going to explore Clark's psyche. The discovery of the backrooms, as well, was very specifically oriented to his experiences. Yet, the backrooms was never fleshed out enough for this to matter.

To see Clark navigate the halls and then slowly come face to face with his "other" self would have made the story so much stronger. It would have also connected his trauma to the liminal space. Similarly, the architecture of the backrooms was very specifically curated to Clark but, again, it never really interacts with him as he walks through it. If this was a liminal space, each room would alter and move to him, both shaping his identity and also being shaped by him. This would have helped play into his character arc as well and why he ultimately descends into madness. Dialogue tells us that moment that he entered the backrooms, his identity became suspended and the longer that he stayed in the space of the backrooms, the more dislocated he became from time and reality, but we never actually see this happen.

Again, I am not saying that this is the worst movie, but it is one example of a story that neglects fleshing out the story that is so clearly there for the taking. Parson's had a vision, that much is clear, and there are a few shots within the film that I thought really stood out; however, without a cohesive plot and no clear idea of what the backrooms actually signified, it's just a mess of cool scenes and vibes.

Watch at your own risk.