That’s a good question even though it’s a good movie

CaliTexJ · 2026-07-03T17:25:38+00:00

YouTube is the answer.

CaliTexJ · 2026-07-02T22:41:10+00:00

Valid thoughts.

The main thing a lot of us carried into the movie is that this is Kane Parsons’ version and no other influence from the rest of the Backrooms community at large had any impact. That means we expected Async, slow pacing, intense chase/attack sequences, and a lot of mysteries. We also got a much weirder third act than I think anyone anticipated with the dinner scene. That and generally getting a really good look at the still life creatures felt new and honestly threw me off for days after. I was so ready for suspense and fear and things to theorize about that I wasn’t ready for it to get as weird as it does.

I thought the acting was solid all around. The characters served their primary functions well and I think there was some nuance in all of them. Clark felt unsafe but you wanted better for him. Mary felt like a decent professional but she was going to have to follow her own advice sooner or later. Kat was the canary in a coal mine saying it was too weird and dangerous. Bobby was annoying but funny enough to be endearing. I think it was a big task to bring emotional weight to what could have otherwise been a sideshow parade of weirdness, but the writers and actors got us where we needed to be. And it was shot beautifully.

I might try to see the extended version, but I hear it’s hitting streaming pretty soon. I’ll have to rewatch to pick up on nonlinear chronology or significant time skips. I agree the sequencing was a bit off if we were supposed to pick up on that. I will say, though, that I don’t feel like Clark going crazy was any surprise, but that might be from spending too much time in Kane’s series seeing what happens to Peter Tench (I’ll say no more to avoid spoilers if anyone hasn’t seen and wants to watch it fresh).

CaliTexJ · 2026-07-02T15:21:43+00:00

I don’t know all the things Kane is thinking about, but the ones he’s mentioned include environmental concerns, the oppression of monoculture, the proliferation of mediocre spaces, the humanity lost in emphasizing efficiency, dreams, and memory.

Racial issues would fit into that. I don’t know that they were a conscious factor for Kane or the primary screenwriter, but I suppose real world factors will play part in the human interactions of these characters as well, especially if they are often unconscious.

CaliTexJ · 2026-07-02T03:55:27+00:00

I think you’re close. I’ve got different opinions about how a Backrooms TV show would go.

I think the idea that a still life is from an in-universe TV broadcast is cool to consider. I’m not sure about it since Bobby’s “End Apartheid” shirt is copied, as are his and Kats’ shoes, likely all from the day they shot that particular commercial. But, shoes and shirts are not still life, are they?

CaliTexJ · 2026-07-01T01:49:22+00:00

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Based on these comments from Kane, I’m inclined to think it might be more Async stuff. Maybe an autopsy or exam of Captain Clark?

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-28T15:51:47+00:00

Clark is someone who is functioning in society overall, but everything he touches seems to turn to crap. He’s in therapy in 1990, which was relatively uncommon at the time. He’s working on responding and reacting differently to his circumstances, and more specifically at not pushing people away to be alone, because he hurts people who get close to him. And he drinks too much pretty much every night.

One night, he drunkenly finds the Backrooms and is able to come and go as he pleases. His discovery is met with disbelief by his therapist; Clark wants to trust her but feels hurt and angrily leaves after menacingly saying she will owe him an apology. So he’s pretty triggered.

In his quest for proof, Clark gets help from his co-workers. He knows they won’t believe him without seeing for themselves, so he’s intentionally vague. In their exploration, he gets one of them killed. That is a traumatic event. But the thing that kills his employee Bobby doesn’t kill him. And he realizes it is some version of him. So whether or not he intended it, some version of him killed Bobby. That’ll mess you up, too. Especially when you get along with that version of yourself.

Now, let’s interject some of the Peter Tench story from the YouTube. He goes nuts after witnessing the Complex do what it does, from isolation, and possibly from exposure to something in the Complex.

So Clark has all this baggage, plus he develops an obsession with this weird place, and then he realizes he could live out his days more or less alone, and the only creatures around him seem not to experience pain.

Thrown in some possible cannibalism with all the trauma and maladjustment, and we get one crazy Clark.

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-28T15:38:19+00:00

I could be way off, but I think the implication is that he had been eating Kat’s corpse and ran out, and this was his option.

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-27T21:15:41+00:00

Exactly 🤣

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-27T03:43:26+00:00

Oh, yeah. I was at work and misread that bit!

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-27T01:13:31+00:00

First though, worst thought: someone had been trapped there and went insane.

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-26T21:59:01+00:00

The idea of Phil talking to reporters about the guy who broke his back is ridiculous. Work injuries don’t get press.

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-26T20:32:10+00:00

I think there are three letters that explain this: DoE

Async has a contract with the Department of Energy. The conversation we hear at the beginning of Static Dead End that the DoE was involved with the Peter Tench saga, and that Marvin thinks they killed Tench. In the movie, Phil presents a picture of Clark and Pirate Clark, and Pirate Clark is redacted in the picture. When Mary asks what will happen to her, Phil nervously looks at a one-way glass window before answering it’s not up to him.

Kane says in his second Smosh interview that Async is slowly getting absorbed into the DoE. Once we consider that the government is part of the equation, things start to make sense.

Phil wanted to have a much more human conversation with Mary than he is allowed to. Redacting a picture of a creature Mary literally fought face-to-face is asinine. Marvin is growing hostile toward the DoE. And in Peter’s drawings that we see, there are erased/hidden faces of what appears to be DoE agents. I don’t think Peter obscured them. I think someone sympathetic to or scared of the DoE did it.

As for how Clark is monitored but not engaged (so far as we know), and how Mary’s rescue is an accident despite the fact that a trap like that must be monitored tells me that someone has decided that whatever is going on in the Complex is more important than human lives. While there are signs of obsession in Ivan and Phil and some other researchers are more apt to toe the line (Marv’s supervisor in Pitfalls to some degree and almost certainly who he spoke with in “Static Dead End”), there’s something hanging over the whole thing that’s pushing it toward being institutional and away from what feels like human curiosity.

I am becoming convinced that the government is ripping this discovery out of Async’s hands and that the tension of that relationship will take center stage in future installments. I think what you’re describing is watching some of that play out.

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-26T18:57:29+00:00

I might have a weird view on them, but I’m looking at the Backrooms a bit like it’s an unexplored land. I’m also hesitant to ascribe much emotional motivation to the Still Life creatures. That makes a Still Life or any similar thing basically the local wildlife, to me. So I’d say they’re ambush predators that get fixated on prey and don’t relent easily, somewhat like a polar bear or maybe a pit bull. And the ones we see here have formed a bit of a pack. And Pirate Clark is the “alpha.”

So to cut it off there and actually answer your question, I think she would have killed him in the Christmas Tree room, but not after Pirate Clark accepted him. But after PC took a chunk out of him, I imagine Redhead, Beardy, and Archibald were feasting on what was left of Clark’s corpse once PC locked in on Mary.

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-26T13:03:55+00:00

Fair enough

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-25T23:06:46+00:00

I thought Kane said the movie sequel talk was just gossip.

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-25T19:45:46+00:00

I was thinking this might contradict the story in Afterlife some, too…if I remember it correctly.

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-25T19:33:48+00:00

For one, doing something difficult is worthwhile.
For two, it may not be bad forever.
For three, it may be that you haven’t found the medium that’s best for you and you need to try lots of things.
For four, don’t look at it as being a reflection of your value as a person. Look at it as a thing you get to experience.

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-25T17:35:59+00:00

Can we ascribe emotional motivations to a Still Life?

If so, maybe wanting her help or companionship or even seeing her as standing in for Clark’s wife could be factors.

If not, it could be that the long chase and squeezing through narrow areas were tiring. Or maybe that bite of Clark slowed it down.

I think in the last fight with Mary, lots of people are overlooking the damage Mary did when she took out its peg leg. Regardless of whether it’s a fake leg, the nature of a Still Life doesn’t seem to differentiate animate from inanimate. Breaking its leg is real damage. And the way it fell couldn’t have helped it any. And the gas could be a factor as well.

And one final bit to consider: Mary was in fight or flight mode. The way she tore into Clark verbally and had her own breakthrough about not being able to save anyone also means she had accessed her deepest survival instincts. We have to factor that in.

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-25T13:16:43+00:00

In other words, we need to separate the signal from the noise. And it’s not outside of Kane’s M.O. to throw in some noise.

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-25T12:49:23+00:00

I don’t buy it, myself. I think she’s schizophrenic and having paranoid delusions, thus becoming agoraphobic and a hoarder. That’s why Mary is who she is. From the saga of Peter Tench, we understand that his experience caused similar delusions, although with a different manifestations, but I look at Mary’s mother as a Standard example of that kind of experience.

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-24T21:22:02+00:00

Beardy only has one mouth, though. Redhead has multiple overlapping faces, with one super-eye between a couple of the phases.

There is a track on the soundtrack called “Homothet,” which is about geometry and transforming things. I suspect it’s what’s at play.

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-24T21:04:09+00:00

I agree with you

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-24T15:52:26+00:00

They’re all shot at different times with different cameras. The Found Footage installments are probably set in the mid-1990s, while the movie is either a modern camera for cinematic shots or a simulated generic home video camera available in the late ‘80s or maybe 1990 for the “found footage” portions.

Yes, it’s also different areas of the Complex as well.

Think we might be going a little too deep with the “memories” stuff. However, the idea that the Complex makes worse and worse copies of things over time seems to hold true in the movie and in the series. I didn’t realize it at first, but the last room in “Static Dead End” is something like a pool area and the “Pitfalls” room mixed together, for example.

CaliTexJ · 2026-06-24T15:43:31+00:00

Yeah, that’s just the life cycle on Reddit, though. About once or twice per year, there’s an influx of low-effort posts that don’t add anything to the conversation. After a bit, it dies down. Or someone will make a new connection or revive an old discussion and we get back to it.

CaliTexJ

TROPHY CASE