Backrooms (2026)

Director: Kane Parsons

Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Haven’t seen the youtube series, either. But I’m bound by blog magic to acquiesce to any special requests made*.

Did I Like It: And I was willing to say that a large part of my distraction during the film is that I was not in on the whole mythology, wondering if this was how most people felt when they watched a Star Trek film.

But I’m not sure there even is any sort of deeper mythology here. The internet would be tripping over itself to tell me how the story of the film ties in with the web series, which in turn would tie in to the originaly memeification of the original 4chan posts.

Wait a minute. I watched a horror movie based on a meme? I watched a horror movie originally, sort of, even arguably based on 4chan posts?

All right.

The titular backrooms are set up to be a slow pitch down the middle for a novice horror movie cinematographer. Move the camera slightly in almost any direction and something can leap out of the shadows. That’s fine. I don’t have a problem with jump scares. They work, and work more reliably than almost any other scare tactic in the movies. Over-using them can be a problem, but piling them one on top of another like a warehouse of BOO! renders a film as just one long repeat of the last few minutes of The Blair Witch Project (1999). Even that’s not the worst approachfor a horror movie—the last few minutes of Blair Witch are the only ones that really approach working—but eventually I stop asking “What the hell was that?” and say “Oh. It’s a pirate. He wants to sell me a bedroom set, or bite me in the shoulder. Got it.”

*Feels like maybe I shouldn’t have revealed that.

Biosphere (2023)

Director: Mel Eslyn

Cast: Sterling K. Brown, Mark Duplass

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. In a supreme twist of fate, Lora talked me into going to see a movie I had yet to hear about.

Did I Like It: I mean this in the best possible way. This movie is very strange. Go ahead, watch the trailer real quick before we begin. I’ll wait.

Pretty strange, right? Here’s the thing, it’s far stranger than anyone will tell you before actually starting the movie. It’s more than just strange. It’s a perfectly functional buddy comedy, a tragedy (depending on how you read that ending, and how long has it been since I’ve really had to think about the ending of a movie?), and a surprisingly thoughtful deconstruction of what we collectively think about gender now.

You read that right. A lot of that isn’t in the trailer.

On spec, the film appears to be a micro-budget sci-fi piece the kind of which we haven’t really seen since Cube (1997) (one might want to point to Moon (2009), but even that film had to spend a fair amount of money to make the audience believe Sam Rockwell was marooned on ). Then again, maybe independent studios are making this kind of film all the time and this like most of those others will disappear into hazy, incomplete memory all too quickly.

But I really don’t think this one will slip into obscurity, assuming enough people get eyes on it. I for one won’t readily forget the Duplass playing a one of the last men on earth/the President of the United States who is likely—by all accounts, almost certainly—responsible for this sad state of affairs, while Brown plays his boyhood best friend/top aide/last-rational-man-on-the-planet-long-before-the-shit-went down. As “life finds a way” (they both appear to be roughly my age, as their references are just so) their relationship continues to develop, even in the face of their own extinction.

I’d tell you more, but that would be ruining most of the truly surprising parts of the movie. Go see it first and then find me. I’d love to talk about it.