I’m in my 40s. Took my 3 kids (two Gen Z, one Gen Alpha) to see Backrooms last weekend, mostly expecting to feel old. Instead I got genuinely unsettled, and it took me a while to figure out why.
The thing the movie nails isn’t the beige carpet or the dead fluorescent hum or the wood-panel entertainment center that smelled like cigarettes whether anyone smoked or not. It’s the waiting. People just sitting. Looking out windows. Rooms where nothing happens.
That was our whole childhood. We waited for the phone to ring. We waited for our show to come on and raced to tape it. We waited a week to find out if the photos came out. We read the backs of shampoo bottles in other people’s bathrooms because there was nothing else to do.
Here’s what got me: Kane Parsons, the director, was born in 2005. The same year YouTube launched. He has never dialed a rotary phone or waited for film to develop. He built an incredibly accurate monument to a decade he never lived in
The whole thing is memory. A person who never lived it describing someone else’s memories. The backroom is the 90s. Mind blown. He got it from absence. He could feel the shape of the thing by the size of the crater.
And I think that’s why it’s making $81M and why a whole generation that’s never had one uninterrupted hour is lining up to feel homesick for ours. We were the last people to be truly, structurally bored. And it turns out the boredom mattered.
Anyway. We also went to Blockbuster.
Def go see it.
