The Ending Backrooms Should Have Had | Fix It 3
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Hosted byDanny Murray
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XrriAKUA0ghttps://www.youtube.com/embed/_XrriAKUA0g
Show Notes
Where exactly did Backrooms fail as a movie?
Directed by rising filmmaker Kane Parsons, Backrooms delivers one of the most atmospheric and unsettling horror worlds we've seen in years. The first half is tense, mysterious, and full of promise, but for us, the back half loses momentum and never fully pays off the incredible premise it sets up.
Kinolime’s creative executive, Danny Murray, breaks down Backrooms’ ending explained, goes through exactly where the story begins to unravel and how a few key structural changes could have transformed the ending into something truly unforgettable.
In this Backrooms review, Danny uses it as a screenwriting case study to explore why second acts often lose momentum and how writers can keep tension building all the way to the climax. He’ll also go through how dialogue can make or break your premise, and how abandoning your main character hurts your story.
This Backrooms analysis is only the tip of the iceberg! If you're an aspiring screenwriter, director, horror filmmaker, or simply love breaking down movies, this series is designed to teach story structure through real films, showing not just what didn't work, but how it could work better.
Full Transcript
[00:00]
Hey everyone, Danny here with the KinoLime Screenwriting podcast.
[00:07]
And today we're going to be talking about back rooms.
[00:11]
This is one of the most highly anticipated films of the year for me, largely because it
[00:15]
is just one of the first real seemingly pivot points in the industry where we are letting
[00:21]
a 20 year old filmmaker who is largely inspired by YouTube videos and video games make a big
[00:29]
largely release movie that everyone's excited for.
[00:33]
There's a lot to talk about with this story.
[00:36]
And largely, you know, this film has been received very well.
[00:40]
There's a few things that we could add to make it even better.
[00:43]
So today we're fixing back rooms.
[00:47]
Before we even get into it, Kane Parsons' back rooms is a hell of a debut for a young filmmaker.
[00:52]
And as I'm about to get into, I love that my only real gripes with this movie is with
[00:57]
how subdued and restrained it is in the second half of the film.
[01:01]
Back rooms is the story of Clark, a failed husband, business owner, and architect who stumbles
[01:06]
upon a new dimension in the basement of his furniture store and sets out to find meaning
[01:11]
within it while losing all sense of meaning in his actual life.
[01:15]
He navigates this liminal world that manifests his memories, trauma, and own self into distorted
[01:21]
copies that Clark internally brought with him into this new world.
[01:25]
The story largely asks if he will confront his failures and traumas and move forward
[01:29]
as a person, or will he refuse to grow, lose his grip on reality, and descend into the
[01:35]
nihilistic, purgatory world he has created in the back rooms.
[01:40]
With an IP that has thousands of pages of open-source lore and is truly his widespreading
[01:45]
and its malleability to adaptation, as the back rooms themselves, I cannot wait to see
[01:51]
the end result of what really felt like, if executed well, could be the mark of a new
[01:55]
cinematic era centered around young filmmakers and their original stories in a way that Hollywood
[02:01]
largely hasn't captured since the 90s.
[02:04]
Largely, that's what I felt like I got in the first half of this film.
[02:08]
Back rooms first half manages to be as terrifying as it is unsettling through liminal space, bright
[02:12]
light, and the meandering boredom of corporate American purgatory without adhering to much
[02:18]
of any of the classical tropes you would expect to scare you in a wide-released horror
[02:22]
film.
[02:23]
There's pretty much nothing I would change in the first half of this film, but back
[02:27]
room starts to lose me when it stops trusting me as an audience member and begins to blatantly
[02:31]
explain the motifs of the film to camera.
[02:34]
This is largely all of Act 2B and Long Swaths of the Third Act, culminating in Mary Spoiler
[02:40]
Alert, literally killing a still-life Clark with a rock that is a fragment of her repressed
[02:46]
trauma from childhood.
[02:48]
I mean, come on.
[02:49]
Is the back rooms a metaphor for repressed trauma?
[02:52]
We see that through the Captain Clark still life.
[02:55]
Modern workplace isolation through its desolate office spaces.
[03:00]
The internet through its vast, never-ending information replication.
[03:03]
AI, when it's described as someone drawing a dog who's never seen a dog, entraining
[03:11]
from data taken without consent from the human mind.
[03:14]
It is all of these and more, which is what makes this premise so great.
[03:18]
It's a setting that excels by harnessing the existential dread that we all face, by existing
[03:23]
in modern prisons that we've created for ourselves, and leaving the rest up for interpretation.
[03:29]
For a film about a nightmarish, uncanny empire of the isolated deep recesses of human trauma,
[03:35]
fear and suffering, the film's second half is far too laden with linear exposition
[03:40]
to satisfy the potential of its premise.
[03:43]
The lack of cinematic influence really shows itself in the second act.
[03:47]
Once we've exhausted the initial lure of the uncanny valley vibes, the YouTube series
[03:51]
and video game influences provide, and we're ready to be immersed into the psychological
[03:55]
turmoil that could only properly be expressed cinematically.
[04:00]
David Lynch once said, there's a field of relativity.
[04:03]
It has a surface, and it has depths.
[04:06]
There are, like they say, worlds within worlds within worlds.
[04:11]
It's just unbelievable stuff going on, but that's only the marketplace.
[04:15]
You go through the marketplace, and it's really interesting, but there are lots and lots
[04:20]
of chances to get way laid and even go backwards and get lost, to get in trouble.
[04:26]
Parsons literally grew up in the Black Lodge.
[04:29]
His dad's house was decorated with the black and white zig-zagged floor panels and red
[04:34]
drapes that create the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks.
[04:38]
But Kane at the time of making the film hadn't seen any Alincious films.
[04:42]
If he would have just listened to his dad as a kid and watched some of these movies, he
[04:46]
probably would have made a classic in my eyes.
[04:50]
This film follows most of the themes and structures of an inland empire, but just doesn't execute
[04:55]
on the dizzying ambiguity of reality that makes that film so strong.
[05:01]
Inland empire's SD cinematography reflects the camcorder aesthetic of the back rooms.
[05:05]
Inland empire, the lost girl is trapped in a hotel purgatory and forced to relive her
[05:10]
traumas the same way we get lost in the back rooms and have our traumas reflected back
[05:15]
at us.
[05:16]
Nikki Grace loses herself in the role of Sue Blue, like how Clark loses himself in the
[05:20]
back rooms and is embodied by Captain Clark.
[05:24]
Both worlds tell us that the world is as you are, and at the risk of sounding too cheesy,
[05:29]
outwardly reflect our inner empires and explore the back rooms of our minds.
[05:35]
With all these comps, the themes I wish back rooms would have taken from inland empires
[05:39]
that we don't need to understand everything about this world.
[05:44]
We just can't be bored.
[05:46]
Inland empire is as baffling and confusing as it is rewarding, a film that holds onto
[05:50]
a feeling, a suffocating sense that the structures we exist in are made up and largely exist
[05:56]
to make us go insane.
[05:58]
The first half of back rooms captures this, but over explains its themes so overtly that
[06:04]
the liminality of the world becomes muted and traditional in its structure and feel.
[06:09]
At Inland empire's midpoint, Nikki spirals into a full-fledged identity crisis.
[06:14]
We plunge into Nikki's inner world of ideas.
[06:17]
We get lost, and we can't find our way back.
[06:20]
As we dive deeper into her inner world, her identity collapses onto itself and the deeper
[06:25]
depths of her psyche become further warped and terrifying.
[06:29]
While I still enjoy back rooms, this rough second half structure is a strong blueprint
[06:35]
to get the most out of Clark's character.
[06:37]
The film loses itself at what I believe is its strongest moment.
[06:42]
After an act 2A investigation of the back rooms descends into a nightmare at our cataclysmic
[06:47]
moment where we must face the true nature of this dimension, we essentially leave our
[06:53]
protagonist and restart the movie from a less interesting character's perspective and
[06:57]
watch them run through the same story beats Clark just did until we get to the third act.
[07:03]
The back rooms have seemingly infinite levels, creatures, and embedded conflicts within
[07:08]
it that we would have been better served watching Clark navigate.
[07:13]
Instead of accepting the first monster he sees and befriending it immediately, accepting
[07:17]
this as a reasonable society where he can be who he'd like, we'd have Clark get truly
[07:22]
lost in the back rooms.
[07:24]
As he looks to escape he dives deeper and deeper into different levels, more of himself,
[07:28]
his trauma, his fears, his thoughts are being exorbed by the world around him.
[07:33]
As he loses hope of ever finding his way out and thus finding a pathway to redemption
[07:37]
for his failures in the real world, he digs further into the back rooms to find a world
[07:43]
that might not be his own, but will be close enough to what he yearns for that he can
[07:47]
push away his insecurities, his failures, his nightmares, and live with himself within
[07:53]
it.
[07:54]
As he dives deeper the world he inhabits becomes less and less tethered to his reality.
[08:00]
The figment of his wife we initially see screaming and running from him and begins to follow
[08:03]
his orders, still lives do as he commands.
[08:07]
When every is forced to confront a fault of his own, he can dive deeper, explore new facets
[08:12]
of this world, and run away until he can exist in a reality where he doesn't have to face
[08:17]
himself and all of his worst impulses are reinforced.
[08:22]
A tighter third act plays out similarly to how it does now, culminating with Clark finding
[08:27]
kidnapping and eventually breaking down to his therapist.
[08:30]
At the climax, Clark realizes he may be the architect of his own pain and is quickly
[08:35]
consumed by Captain Clark, who is no longer tethered to his creator with this realization.
[08:40]
Mary escapes Captain Clark but is left tethered to the back rooms and, much like we can assume
[08:45]
will be the case for a true character, is left trapped in the back rooms forever.
[08:50]
The movie is really great on its own, but allowing Clark's madness to be exacerbated by
[08:55]
the power of the back rooms gives us a clear protagonist, less exposition, and a deeper
[09:00]
understanding and not just what makes this setting uncanny, but also what makes Kane Parsons
[09:05]
so exciting as a young filmmaker by providing more opportunities to play in this world he
[09:11]
has mastery over and that made us so excited to see this film in the first place.
[09:15]
By making the second act less literal and allowing the madness Clark descends into happen
[09:20]
on screen, we'd be able to propel our act to be which I currently believe is the one
[09:25]
weak point in this film into what could be the most dramatic action-packed sequence in
[09:29]
the story.
[09:31]
Regardless of me nitpicking, back rooms is an outstanding debut and I can't wait to see
[09:35]
what Kane has next in store and to watch his growth as a filmmaker.
[09:41]
So that's how we fix back rooms.
[09:43]
I love the movie to begin with, I hope this made you love it a little more.
[09:49]
There's a lot to pull from for this one, so let me know maybe what I missed, what you
[09:53]
think, I shouldn't have cut, what you think I should have added.
[09:56]
What did you think was the moment where you said, oh this guy's stupid and doesn't know
[10:00]
what he's talking about and I need to turn this off.
[10:03]
Probably right now if you haven't already done it, so stop in the comments and tell me
[10:06]
what that was.
[10:07]
Appreciate you tuning in.
[10:09]
Thanks so much, tune in for the next one.
[10:10]
Like, subscribe, comment, do all the jazz, see you next time.
[10:13]
If you got something out of today's podcast, please share it with your filmmaking and
[10:16]
screen running community and hit subscribe.
[10:19]
It genuinely helps us keep making these.
[10:21]
We need them and we'll see you in the next one.
