I was genuinely looking forward to this film more than Mandalorian and Grogu. The trailer had a lot of mystery without spoiling too much so was the perfect type of trailer. The film is based on a web series that started on creepypasta and this got picked up by A24. Now I have never seen the YouTube stuff that he did but this film is a continuation of that stuff but I dont feel like i was missing out on not having seen it. There will obviously have been Easter eggs in the film but I never felt like I was missing out but if you have seen the other stuff then you will get the references.
I thought that when Mary is pulled away by the people in the hazmat suits and it fades to black that the film was over would have been a terrible ending but then thankfully it continues but then worried again that we were going to be bombarded with exposition but thankfully we weren’t and what we ended up getting was a satisfying ending that l thought was mysterious but still gave us enough information. The explanation is that a company that started to do work in MRI stopped all that so that they could research this area that seems to go on and on forever.
The film doesn't have many performances but that two central ones are Chiwetel Ejiofor who plays Clark and Renate Reinsve who plays Mary the psychiatrist. I liked Reinsve in Sentimental Value which was Oscar nominated this year and both of them play flawed people. Clark runs a furniture store that is failing (never see a customer) and his marriage is falling apart and he lives in the store and once Mary finds him, he decides to stay because its where he feels at home and can sort of wallow in his misery. Mary has her own issues, she seems to have a good life by being a psychiatrist but we see that she has a book for sale and we see her eating her dinner on the couch and she had a mother who seemed to have a mental illness. The film ends with her seemingly trapped in this world but it is left ambiguous. Ejiofor is very good as someone who can’t get past the fact things have happened to him and he can’t accept that he is responsible. The scene where Clark is at the dinner table with Mary, the bearded guy and the woman in the red office dress and he grabs chunks of white something and puts it on the plates and it was at this point that the focus shifted to Mary as she is trying to escape from the 8ft Pirate Clark. They dont spend a huge amount of time together so it’s hard to really rate their chemistry but on their own they were both very good.
There is a great sense of claustrophobia when they move into the Backrooms. There were a couple of moments which genuinely did make me jump and this was a rare case of jumpscares actually working because they weren’t earnt so I didn’t mind. The fact that it is brightly lit shows that you can light rooms and things can still be unnerving or scary. The 8ft Pirate Clark looked creepy even when we got to see it which is not what I was expecting but again shows that you can make this stuff work when you reveal things.
I do think that we are in a strong period for horror films. There is this, there was Obsession, Iron Lung, Exit 8 and this is another film that is made by a YouTuber and it’s shocking and quite frankly soul destroying to know that Kane Parsons is 20 YEARS OLD!!!! This film did have involvement from the likes of James Wan and Osgood Perkins so hopefully they had a positive impact on him and this is the start of a very promising career. Very good stuff.
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