Nineties Basement Realism

Floral prints. Overstuffed furniture. Pastel wallpaper. Big glasses. Two recent films, Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron and Kane Parsons’s Backrooms, tap into a domestic aesthetic of the 1990s to trigger associations of drab honesty, lost innocence, and buried memories. I’ll call this invocation – the feeling of a softly-bubbling fishtank you can smell across a carpeted room under halogen lighting – Nineties Basement Realism. For Romvari, the setting is obvious: she made an autobiographical movie about reckoning with her own childhood. For Parsons, born only in 2005, the setting is more archeological, abstracted and presented for interpretation like a museum artefact, but used for curiously similar ends. Both filmmakers are employing this evocative aesthetic space as an environment for characters to excavate identity amongst dubious potsherds of memory.

It’s fun to try to figure out why it works so well, since Parsons’s precocious age makes it clear that the aesthetic has a hold that transcends the mere association with one’s personal childhood. It might have to do with a precise historical distance: far enough to feel increasingly foreign, close enough to escape the plastic phoniness of period-piece recreation. One reason why movies set in the sixties, say, never quite feel lived-in, is that period modernism is treated as though it happened overnight – as though all clothes, furniture, light-fixtures and glassware were instantly-replaced and up-to-date (studying films from the period probably only compounds the error, since classic Hollywood production design would generally furnish sets from the ground-up, and therefore invent an unrealistically contemporary modernity). But the nineties are close enough in memory that we can furnish them as they actually were in our mind’s eye, in a way that rhymes with how that basement carpet smelled: couches and hand-me-down clothes from the eighties, wallpaper and wood-panelling from the seventies, the accumulation of past lives and the flotsam of former fashions that constitute the lived-in feel of a real space.

But the effectiveness maybe also have to do with the historic era vis-à-vis technology: the cusp of digital and widespread consumer video tech. Blue Heron features the seductive intrusion of a home computer connected to dial-up Internet, and Backrooms is broken up by segments of handheld camcorder footage. This is the moment when memories began to migrate out of the amygdala and into the visual cortex, when dreamlike, personal associations lost out to readily-available media, shedding a haunting ineffability in the process, while assuming a misleading concreteness.

The recreations of an immigrant childhood on Vancouver Island in Blue Heron work very well in the first half of the film. The choice of shots, often imitating the angles of a child spying on adults, call to mind Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, one of the best coming-of-age movies in recent years, as well as some of Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (both of which are also totally Nineties Basement Realism). A young girl, Sasha (Eylul Guven) is observing the family struggle with her mentally-unwell teenaged brother. Then, a second-half twists turns the story into something kind of like Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman: the roles and identities of the characters in the remembered family drama begin to bleed and slip. Suddenly the daughter, Sasha, now grown up (Amy Zimmer), has become the government agent intervening in the destiny of the troubled son, but she’s also kind of the mother too.

The switch from the Nineties to the Present Day is accompanied by a dramatic aesthetic switch: Adult Sasha first appears in a book-lined apartment with a great view, framed inside a classically cozy composition as if posing for Architectural Digest. It’s jarring because it feels like a flex: we instantly sense that our attempts to excavate meaning from the past will now be coloured by a sort of self-centered condescension, like that of a colonial explorer in a strange land. This character is trying to discover what happened to her ill teenaged brother, who seems to have vanished mysteriously, but it’s not clear whether she’s rooting for understanding, or for blame, or just for some way to integrate this story into her life that makes sense.

Personally, I did not find that the second half of Blue Heron brought me any insights that illuminated any of the soft, pained poetry of the first. The early aesthetics, in turns out, were doing a lot of heavy-lifting. But there’s a beguiling recognition of that. The movie’s best scene involves the father taking photographs of his children’s destructive, messy play, then inviting them to watch as he develops the pictures in his darkroom. The kids become transfixed by the process, the memories slowly resolving into snatches of peculiar visual language before their eyes. Something of themselves has been captured, and now it will never escape.

Memory is a trap in Backrooms too. This horror film also opens on tableaux of mysterious recollected childhood vignettes. The imagery is sharp: a small palm pressed into congealing concrete, the rubble of a ruined home about to be dropped by heavy machinery, seemingly onto the heads of mother and child. The girl here grows up to be a self-help guru, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) promoting pablum about the need to break free from patterned thinking, but the imagery displays an engagement with memory deeper than what the slightly-tawdry dialogue can muster.

As you probably know, Backrooms is both a certified theatrical hit and a continuation or expansion of a YouTube web series inspired by a 4chan creepypasta post. I’m not aware of the lore, but I suspect that’s preferable: there are mysterious plot movements that seem to come from nowhere, and go nowhere, and that helpfully adds to the dreamlike atmosphere (though other plot strains presumably connected to the online lore – the researchers – are completely without interest).

Adult Mary Kline remains mysterious, to us and herself, very much like Sasha in Blue Heron. But where Blue Heron comes up for air in the second half, becoming almost clinical in the way the filmmaker’s perspective cooly insert itself into alternate roles, Backrooms is eager to burrow deeper. A labyrinth of nineties-coded architecture (subtly-patterned wallpaper-lined suburban-strip-mall-style corridors) unspools endlessly behind the façade of familiarity. Sometimes this space is navigated by handheld camcorder, like in a found-footage flick, but sometimes we explore in the third-person like a traditional movie. The space is not only infected by the associations of memory, but is also maybe located inside of it. While the portal belongs to a furniture-store owner named Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and may be haunted by him, there’s an accumulation of uncanny visual rhymes with Mary’s childhood. Like with Eyes Wide Shut, we suspect that the master key can be found in the answer to the question: Is this his dream, or hers? Or, is what makes memory truly creepy and unreliable the fact that it’s a shared space, retroactively remutated by whoever wanders its halls?

While Backrooms uses Nineties Basement Realism as a staging ground for unearthing memories that provide unreliable clues about who we are, it cleverly blends that aesthetic with a very contemporary one: the language of computer-graphics glitches, and artificial intelligence errors. Furniture clips through walls, and human figures are generated with too many fingers, or Picasso-like scrambled facial features. The visual references to Cubism, a 100-year-old artistic attempt to grapple with not what we see but how we see it, are clever: it suggests how computer models’ faulty attempts to recreate memory mimic, rather than misrepresent, our own faulty faculties. Our outsourcing of memories from brains to hard drives has only transferred the problem of our inability to fully access the past through this corruptible and misleading medium. Every human is a broken attempt to continuously reconstruct a self from dubious and faultily-replicated fragments. That idea is inseparable from the 1990s vibe, and it’s what makes Backrooms a great film.