Reviews! "Backrooms," "Omaha," and "Affection"

Dear readers,

We were supposed to publish last week, but life got between me and the movies. The good news is that you’re getting an issue now, and another one next Monday, so we’re not so much behind.

Horror | 1h 45m | R | Theaters
Director: Kane Parsons
Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass

What’s It About? Based on the Backrooms creepypasta, the film follows a therapist whose patient vanishes into some reality-warping dimension, forcing her to go after him.

Do You Recommend It?… Yes. To call Backrooms unconventional would be an understatement. It’s a horror movie only in the loosest sense: yes, it creates tension, and yes, it unsettles you, but what makes it frightening is less what happens than what it seems to mean. It plays like an unguided tour through the pits of one man’s subconscious, a place where his banal memories have merged into a yellow maze of department-store walls and abandoned furniture. The stuff of nightmares here doesn’t spring from some buried childhood trauma, but from something rather pathetic: his crippling self-pity. Director Parsons, a 20-year-old YouTuber, brings his vision to life with impressive confidence, drawing from anime and VHS visual culture.

Rating: ★★★★☆

Drama | 1h 23m | PG-13 | Video on Demand
Director: Cole Webley
Cast: John Magaro, Molly Belle Wright, and Wyatt Solis

What’s It About? A father conceals the truth about his family’s seemingly spontaneous cross-country road trip.

Do You Recommend It? No… It’s hard to feel much sympathy for a character who does something awful when the movie keeps him at such a distance. We get clues of the misery and trauma that have pushed this father toward a catastrophic decision, but clues aren’t the same as understanding. Is he mentally unstable? Has he burned through every possible source of help? Were there no other doors left open to him? The film is so determined not to get mushy or sentimental that it forgets to give us the emotional case for its own cynicism, and without that, we’re left watching from afar, shaking our heads in disapproval when the movie wants us to walk in someone else’s shoes. Still, the three performances at the center of this uneven drama are top notch.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Sci-Fi/Horror | 1h 30 | Unrated | Video on Demand
Director: BT Meza
Cast: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, and Julianna Layne

What’s It About? Ellie wakes up into a life that should belong to her but feels borrowed, with a husband and daughter she can’t quite remember and only a few eerie scraps of herself left to cling to.

Do You Recommend It? Yes… Affection is exactly the kind of movie I like to spotlight in this newsletter: no wide release, no big-studio muscle, no built-in prestige machine humming behind it. Just a low-budget genre movie with a nifty little hook and enough juice to see it all through. The draw here is the concept: a Memento-esque puzzle about selfhood and memory, wrapped in a sci-fi skin. Jessica Rothe, who already proved she had comedic timing and scream-queen chops in Happy Death Day and its sequel, gets a more physical role here, and she’s good at it. She twists and convulses as memories come flooding back in the form of seizures. This isn’t some cult-classic in the making, but it’s a fine diversion if you like your sci-fi rough around the edges.

Rating: ★★★☆☆