When I went to the movies today, I was thinking about watching three horror flicks in a row: Backrooms, Obsession and Passenger. I mean, if you're going to return to the horror genre after many years away, why not go back in a big way, right? Well, by the end of this movie I'd had all the creeps I could absorb on one occasion. And that includes the trailers (one for an upcoming Insidious movie was particularly hairraising). I don't even know how to describe this movie. It's unlike anything I've seen before, for sure. It's an impressive directorial debut by Kane Parsons, based on his own web series. It apparently made back its entire $10 million production budget in a single day, a Thursday preview. And if your question is whether it's scary, let me just say ... It's like a nightmare. No, a nightmare within a nightmare. Nested nightmares all the way down. The kind of nightmare from which you struggle to the surface, only to find yourself inside another nightmare. And after doing this several times over, it turns out to be not even your nightmare, but somebody else's.
It's a movie in which unhappy people find their way into a strange place that brings their unhappiness to a horrific pitch. Central to it are the manager of a failing furniture store – you never once see a customer in it; at one time he tells his assistant manager that she can open the store and she's like, "It's already open" – who is seeing a shrink to deal with the character problems that have led to him being alone in life, and the shrink who carries her own burden of disturbing childhood memories. They're played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, respectively. With a minimum of other speaking characters, it creates a mindscape of florid insanity out of what seems like a bland, windowless, labyrinthine office building that Ejiofor's character literally stumbles into through an invisible doorway (like walking right through a wall) in his store's basement showroom. He later describes it as a place that contains all places that have ever been, badly remembered; designed as if by a being who had never seen a building before but to whom one had been described. And it has evil things in it. Or maybe he's the evil thing? Not sure that makes it less horrid.
I'm going to get right to the Three Scenes That Made It For Me before I get too close to bedtime to have any hope of getting to sleep tonight. (1) The awful results when Ejiofor tries to recruit his assistant manager and her boyfriend to help him document the strange place he has discovered. (2) The shrink tells her patient off, screaming that he's to blame for all the unhappiness in his life and not for the reason he thinks, and that there's no point in trying to change; she can't help him. Just when it seems like the nightmare might be about to end, it turns a corner into an entirely new nightmare. (3) Reinsve's desperate struggle to escape. Does she succeed? Does she? Does she? DOES SHE??? Well, that was a topic of debate that I overheard spilling out of the theater into the adjacent shopping mall after the movie ended. I'm not sure I buy the explanation one filmgoer was trying to give the other. All I can say, in the last analysis, and with as much seriousness and eloquence as I can muster, is: What. the. actual. F*CK!
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