It’s 1990. This morning I found an open door in the shopping centre of the dull commuter town I live in.

Beyond the door are a series of large empty rooms, poorly lit, with large boxes.

Backrooms.

I phoned my friend Matthew Woods. Woodsy. He pedaled over his BMX and together we’re going to explore the rooms.

I’ve made it to the third room but Woodsy has disappeared. Now I’m hiding behind the boxes as footsteps approach.

What are these rooms? Where do they lead? Who is coming for me?

Woodsy’s pudgy face appears over the box, and his annoying older brother Rick who works in Dixons the electronic store. They’re laughing.

“Damo you twat” Rick roars “you’re in the backroom of Dixons”.

Because there are no liminal spaces.

Only backrooms.

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Mainstream cinema is choking on its own product.

Every movie is a perfect 3-act structure, complete with Inciting Incident, Rising Action, Crisis, Climax and Resolution.

Every hero has a meaningful journey that will hit at least nine of Joseph Campbell’s seventeen stages.

Every location up to and including alien worlds and Heaven above is an exercise in logical worldbuilding realised as a CGI model in a supercomputer.

Everything is a reboot, a prequel, a mashup and an exercise in fan service.

And now even the most normie of normie audiences are sick of the product.

When along comes a movie that hurls The Writer’s Journey in the bin and treats narrative structure like dated fashion trend its refusing to wear.

A movie that follows characters who have no desires to drive them, whose only arcs are traced through non-euclidean liminal spaces.

And a movie whose one notable location is the kind of storage room found behind most large shops.

The Backrooms, directed by 20 year old Kane Parsons, extending his super successful webseries, itself inspired by the “creepypasta” backrooms meme.

A movie that … well … is basically a mid 1990s video art installation straight out of MoMA or Tate Modern.

But now in a multiplex near year.

Because Backrooms is avant-garde art for normies.

Hey guys. Just taking a moment to share a personal confession, that I like many of you often struggle to get a good night’s sleep…

…because of the crushing weight of living in capitalist realism.

Until I found the solution…and no it’s not one of those “sleep trackers” that induces the exact cycle of low grade anxiety guaranteed to shatter your rest.

Introducing the NoClip mattress from BackroomBeds. Their patented Liminalweave technology allows one half your body to rest in the dreary reality of having to get up at 7:30am for another day in the office, while the other half clips off on an adventure in non-euclidean spacetime.

You won’t feel any better rested but you will at least feel some hope that there is anything, anywhere beyond another trip to the shopping mall.

Get your NoClip mattress from BackroomBeds by walking through the wall of any good basement near you.