Backrooms Review

I have a rule: that I will only watch one film's trailer once whenever possible. Now, I know a common practice among film critics is to avoid trailers. But although here I slap away at my keyboard, putting digital words to digital paper about films for you the reader to read, I am a fan first and foremost. I love all kinds, and that includes horror. So when I first saw the preview for "Backrooms," the cinema buff in me perked up with unreasonable levels of excitement. I created expectations that no movie probably could satisfy. Then I actually saw it.

In a packed, rowdy theater, where even the nosebleed section was filled, I admired "Backrooms" for its ambition, it's spectacular premise, evocative set design and general sense of mystery, but I can't recommend it. Then again why can't I? Just because it is filled with idiotic characters, offers absolutely no explanation, is somehow both ten minutes too long and too short, and overall frustrating? How could I be frustrated if it didn't tickle that little film freak in me?

Set in the 90s, for no particular reason other than to possibly remove the problem of characters having cell phones, this is a movie that, yes, is about big, empty rooms. Walls colored an olive green, rooms connect with no rhyme or rhythm and they go on and on. You can hear the fizzing of the fluorescent lights and practically can smell the cigarette smoke baked into the carpet: the whole thing is innocent in theory but unsettling in practice.

Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, a loser owner of a discount furniture store who is still struggling with his wife leaving him. He has no real friends, unless you count his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) or his two, dating, employees, Bobby and Kat (Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell, respectively). Mary has her own baggage (probably could use a shrink herself), told through flashbacks of her abusive upbringing by her paranoid mother, but at least she has any development: our poor staff lover pair, um, well she wears flip flops and him shoes, I guess?

Clark's shop isn't doing too well, never a customer ever in sight, and to make matters worse, the lights keep flickering, sometimes going out entirely. An electrician notices some baffling breakers in the downstairs, which seemingly do nothing. But then one night, Clark is drinking, watching TV while lounging on his own merchandise (maybe it's used furniture?) when the TV shows what looks like security footage of some strange place, then turns off. The lights flicker too, so the inebriated business owner marches back down to the breakers, flipping them indiscriminately. Them all off now, he ends up walking past a wall when he notices something: a chartreuse mist barely poking through a seemingly solid wall.

It turns out that the wall isn't a wall, but a sort of doorway to the titular labyrinth. You can freely walk in and out as well, which doesn't really make any sense considering no one has ever even accidentally bumped into the portal. Unless Clark really never has any patrons, but I digress. 

What exactly is in the backrooms? On the first night, Clark senses something, seeing things crash about once he's further inside and needs to escape back to his store. But the surprising discovery and possible threat aren't enough for him to like, you know, call the police or the Ghostbusters or something. Instead, he spends several off-screen days crudely mapping it out on paper. He presents this to Mary, who understandably doesn't believe him, so he offers Kit and Bobby overtime to help him delve even deeper inside. Specifically, this one hallway that's at too steep a decline to traverse without a sort of rope or something. Armed with a video camera, Bobby goes down and well, I should probably skip past this.

Later on, and by reasons never defined, Clark leaves a message on Mary's answering machine, ultimately saying he won't be able to see her again. Then, in an obvious breach of the Tarasoff rule, she heads into his store, right as he described, and enters herself. Alone, without contacting anyone first. Now, I am no therapist, nor do I have one, but someone really should check this lady's credentials.

More things happen, then even more things, but there's less here than the sum of its parts. I appreciated the light touches of comedy (especially Clark's local commercials early on), but with moments of thrillers, science fiction, psychological and body horror, but to what end? Why are their security cameras? What exactly is inside these rooms, and why are they here? How has no one ever noticed them? You'd think construction workers or something would have stumbled into them by mistake.

"Backrooms" sets up all these interesting ideas but is ultimately untrustworthy with the power it wields. And just when you think it's going to settle down and fully explore one of the many different paths to take it's shockingly fun idea, the filmmakers pivot to yet another underexplained area. And I would be fine with an exercise in the philosophical, but you can't expect your film to deserve such mental gymnastics to comprehend when you only tackle such topics when you can come up with interesting ways to film it.

But then I remember that this is director Kane Parsons and writer Will Soodik's first feature film, made with a reported budget of just ten million. This is not some sleazy, exploitative cheapie but a thought-provoking and thought-aggravating work of pure and blind enthusiasm.

Passenger Review

The new movie "Passenger" is tawdry, nonsensical, frustrating and boring, when it's not funny for all the wrong reasons. It tells the story of a young couple who live out of their RV when, one night after witnessing a car accident, are "marked" by a mysterious folk demon who terrorizes travelers under the moonlight. In other words, it's "The Hitcher" with ghosts.

Jacob Scipio and Lou Llobell star as Tyler and Maddie, respectively, a young couple of very different upbringings. He comes from a broken home, and she the foster system, and for some reason they decide that the best way to find some form of stable life is living out of an RV. The two have packed up their belongings and quit their cushy New York City jobs as, something- ohh I'm sorry, did I say quit? I meant "retired." I mention this only because it's about the only other character development either receive.

On their first night on the open road, a speeding car pulls up next to them, their windshield smashed and the driver in a frenzy. They slow down to let them pass, thinking maybe it's a drunk or road rager, but a few miles up, they see the car in a ditch. It's crashed into the neighboring trees, so the two pull over to make sure the driver is alright. (These must be the nicest New Yorkers ever on film.) He's not and soon the cops arrive, but not before Maddie notices scratch marks on the back of the car. She then thinks she sees someone hidden in the woods, but even when they notice their van now has the same scars, she shakes it off like any good heroine in a horror movie would.

They then attend a nomad gathering for other people who live in their van, and boy, is Tyler in his element- he even finds someone who can buff out the scratch. Maddie, however, is fixated on a missing peoples board (she must be fun at parties), when she soon bumps into a fellow van-lifer (Melissa Leo), an old woman who warns never to drive at night and never stop for anything as if it's common knowledge. You'd think it'd be in the car's manual.

But Maddie keeps seeing things, a man specifically, dressed in black with his face obscured in the shadows, but only when she's near the vehicle. Inside a motel room? Shopping in an antique shop? Working out at a 24/7 gym? No strange visions. You would think she could simply stop living in the RV, but she explicitly discards that idea as "not how she thinks this works." I dunno, I thought it was at least worth a shot.

Anyway, at first it's only Maddie who is being stalked by the unseen stranger, but eventually Tyler begins to see it too. Now both of them are in a panic, and the two decide to hightail it to where they know that elderly vagabond from before was heading (you'd think they'd belong to the same Facebook group or something). Driving only under sunlight, they eventually track her down, where she lore-dumps what's going on. Yup you guessed it, they're being hunted by an ancient evil spirit and their only possible way out is, well, you get where this is going.

"Passenger" runs out of steam well before its final act, asking characters to do dumb things only dumb characters do in dumb horror movies, like crawling under an RV for lug nuts or wandering away from each other with the only light being the blinking red flash of taillights. You can tell exactly when something is going to jump out and yell "boo," by the way the music stops and the camera gets real close to someone's face, and that pattern is detected early on and never deviated from.

Then there's the villain himself, the "Passenger" as it were. He is chronically goofy looking, like an aging Cory Feldman with his face painted white. It's a laughable excuse for a horror movie icon. He looks more smelly than scary.

Seen in a relatively packed theater, the audience sat in total silence throughout its ninety some odd minute runtime, the myriad of painfully telegraphed jump scares failing to elicit any emotion from the crowd. I, for one, laughed a few times, rolled my eyes even more, but mostly, I tried with all my vigor not to fall asleep. (Movie tickets ain't cheap, ya know?)

Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War Review

The most distracting thing about "Jack Ryan: Ghost War" isn't its occasionally misguided politics or overly loud action scenes, it is Jack Ryan himself. Portrayed by nearly a half dozen different actors over the past several decades, nobody will ever be able to take the mantel away from Harrison Ford's two-film run occupying the iconic literary hero. Every bit as convincing with a gun as he is delivering doomy monologues in big rooms filled with well-dressed government officials, his tenure casts a massive cloud over all who came before and after.

John Krasinski dons the famous name this time, reprising it from the Amazon Prime show from a few years back, and he simply isn't up to snuff. Mostly credible with a machine gun, sure, but that's not what Jack Ryan is about. He's an analyst, something even this movie makes a point of emphasizing, but come on, this is Hollywood we're talking about. So they give him guns and he blasts away bad guys, big deal. That's more a fault of the script and not the actor, but Krasinski can't dominate the screen like his far-removed predecessor even when the screenplay accidentally gives him something to do other than hold a weapon in a place he probably shouldn't be. 

The plot, which involves the CIA's Deputy Director Greer (Wendell Pierce) and an old secret black-ops unit called "Starling," long believed to be deactivated, only it isn't. He's unaware of its continued operations, and when MI6 asks for him to "pick up a package," he sends Ryan, now a civilian, to retrieve it. Why he doesn't go himself is never explained, nor why he doesn't send, you know, someone who isn't retired to go, but it's a good thing such a high-ranking official stays behind his large solid-wood desk: Ryan and his contractor partner (Michael Kelly) are ambushed on a boat in Dubai. They're held hostage, er well, I mean "saved," well, more like taken into custody by an MI6 agent Emma (Sienna Miller), where they learn Greer's old pal Crown (Max Beesley) not only was behind the attack, but also Starling's current enterprise.

Oh, and the package? It ends up being a crushed pack of cigarettes, given to Ryan by a nervous Cooke (Douglas Hodge), who we first meet in the film's opening trying to steal a list of contacts from Crown. This whole thing sounds like it could have just been a phone call.

The plot is needless political hodgepodge, name-dropping 9/11 and words like "terrorism" and "torture" as if there aren't more relevant headlines in today's news, but then I remember the character of Ryan originates from 1984, so no wonder the whole thing smells a bit musty. (Suppose I should be grateful it's not about the USSR.) 

And it surely can't be this difficult to get right- I mean, there's, what, over a dozen novels worth of material they could use. But that would take actually picking up a book and reading, and honestly, who reads books?

But I don't care that the narrative is antiquated or a bit silly, but what I do fault is how it is unnecessarily convoluted: characters often stand around from a safe house to a secret hideout trying to explain the plot to each other. Scenes are overproduced and excessively slick, director Andrew Bernstein staging things like a music video without music, the camera swinging in large angles as big, black SUVs drive quickly down the streets of London and New York. The whole production ends up a James Bond movie stripped of the gadgets, effortless humor and sexiness. What's left is an unmemorable, somber political thriller that checks the boxes of the genre instead of trying to have fun with it. 

Obsession Review

Despite having a plot, the new movie "Obsession" isn't about plot. It's about texture, an uncomfortable and eventually irritating texture where the whole point is to make the audience feel restless and uneasy. It's "cringe horror," if you will. The film, which was written, directed and edited by Curry Barker, goes as far as to not only kill a cat within the first five minutes, but to come up with all sorts of twisted ways for the deceased animal to be desecrated, including consumption. Is that a spoiler? Trust me, I don't think it's any easier to watch with that knowledge.

The film follows a meekish music store employee Bear (Michael Johnston), who is absolutely smitten by his old friend and coworker Nikki (Inde Navarrette). His other friend (and of course, coworker too) Ian advises him to "wait for the right moment" before gushing his puppy love for her, and one evening, after trivia night at the local bar, he gets his chance. He gets to drive Nikki home, alone. It's the perfect time, or so anyone who's ever flirted before in their life would know, but he blows it. She asks him flat out if he likes her and he says no. She walks inside her house, and he sits in his car unable to believe what an idiot he is. If only he knew just how much more of an idiot he's soon to become.

But waiting for another time isn't what Bear is about, because inside his bag is a "One Wish Willow," a vintage novelty item he finds in the local mystic shop. You know, the kind that sells rocks with "energies" and probably weed. The packaging claims it grants the user one wish one time. He had planned on gifting it to Nikki, but decides to use it himself, because he wants results now, dammit. The love of his life almost immediately appears back outside his car, asking for him to spend the night or, for her to spend the night at his place. Again with this guy- he has no idea how to take a hint.

She goes home with him, but not in the traditional, romantic kind of way. Her cat died, she says, only to quickly correct herself that it was him who lost a pet, but actually that her dad has cancer. She is lonely and vulnerable but even a dope like Bear knows something is wrong. That night things continue to get weird, well, Nikki does at least, and the next morning, Bear tries to explain what happened to Ian. He fails to mention the little prayer he made, of course: he isn't exactly the most trustworthy a protagonist. 

But in no time Bear and Nikki are obviously a couple, going on dates and practically living together, but there's still something off about her. He wakes one night to find her in the corner, watching him sleep yet he doesn't really realize how messed up their situation is until it's far too late. In many ways it's a lot like 2024's "The Substance," but at least that picture knew what it was trying to say. "Obsession" is content with just showing us nonsensical images of the macabre.

But I give credit where credit is due: this was at times truly difficult to watch, my body slumping into a distressing lump in my theater's reclining leather chair. Things don't necessarily jump out at you, but in its place is this intense feeling of anxiety. One that, without an actual purpose behind the nasty images onscreen, ends up hollow emotional exploitation. 

There is a nasty, sexist undercurrent to the narrative the movie is happy introducing but not discussing. Throughout the runtime, it is implied that this "new" Nikki has taken over the "old" Nikki's body, who is only able to break out at random. This means Bear effectively has kidnapped her, not to mention constantly raping her, but the script never probes this. All it does is effectively reduce Nikki to a sex object, put through one humiliating situation after the next, all while wearing about as much as Austin Powers did that one time he walked through a hotel lobby. There are plot holes big enough to fit a roll of burning sage through, but narrative cohesion isn't what "Obsession" explores. Barker is clearly a talented director, but next time let us hope he finds an actual writer to work with.