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Matt Belinkie takes the hosting chair for the first time in nearly 20 years of the Overthinking It Podcast, an event so cosmically disorienting that he and Jordan Stokes spend several minutes trying to figure out which of the regular hosts they’re each a bizarro duplicate of. And that sets the scene for Backrooms, the A24 horror film directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, adapted from an internet phenomenon that began as a single photo of a Hobby Town under construction posted to 4chan.

This movie, in some ways, is not what you’d expect to get when you give a solo Youtube creator the budget to go big. Because Kane actually chooses to go smaller, rejecting an early screenplay focusing on a shadowy corporation exploring the complex and narrowing his focus to two people: Clark, a divorced, failing furniture-store-owner-who-wanted-to-be-an-architect, and his therapist Mary, who turns out to be — arguably — the actual main character because she’s the only one who gets flashbacks. Building on the lore, the Backrooms turns out to be a psychic funhouse mirror that makes flawed copies of whatever (or WHOever) it makes contact with. It starts with a pile of furniture with too many legs and eventually leads to the horrifying “still lives” — warped shells of human beings who don’t even complain when you eat them. While most people would run for the exits, Clark finds this world where he’s finally in total control more and more seductive. Is it messing with his mind, or was he twisted inside to begin with?

Also discussed: Silent Hill 1 vs Silent Hill 2, the film as a critique of capitalism and/or AI, and why the inevitable Backrooms 2 faces the Lost problem of having to eventually cash the mystery check.

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