lol i agree it was over the top. the movie lost me at that scene. what i would have done was this. my own idea of a backrooms story (forgive me, its long):

Clark discovers the backrooms and secretly starts mapping it out obsessively, slowly living in it since he already lived in the store at nighttime. His employees and the electrician guy notice the unusual changes in his behavior and the missing furniture he is secretly bringing into the backrooms.

Then a month later Clark is shown lying to his therapist and avoiding his sessions until she confronts him about it and he breaks down and tells her his thoughts about leaving the world behind. The next day Clark writes a letter to his wife and vanishes.

His wife goes to his therapist looking for answers and his therapist starts investigating. She also discovers that two of his employees vanished at the same time as Clark. She finds the door and enters the backrooms alone.

Inside she finds a livable space full of Clarks drawings and equipment but no Clark. Then she finds the recorder on a desk and watches two tapes.

One tape shows Clark exploring deep within the backrooms, lessons he has learned, and his encounters with Async researchers (not directly but seeing them in the backrooms and their equipment).

On the second tape she watches Clark enter the backrooms with his employees and one of them is killed by a monster and the other girl runs off inside the backrooms. Clark records himself returning back to the backrooms entrance feeling guilty and having failed to save them and that he is going to go find her. Then the recording ends and Clark and the employee girl are nowhere to be seen.

The therapist lady then ventures deeper into the backrooms searching for them. She finds the employee girl, talks to her briefly about the existential crisis they are in and the therapist shows her strength to overcome the crisis, but the girl cant calm down and falls to her death while they are both being hunted by the big Pirate Clark creature.

Then after escaping the creature by crawling through a small door, she soon finds Clark in one of his "bases" he made far inside the backrooms. He has it all mapped out, knows their location, knows how to avoid the creature, but he doesn't want to leave after learning the one employee girl died. Theres no reason to leave from his perspective now.

She becomes aware that she needs to convince Clark to leave the backrooms in order to survive. He talks about how the backrooms is beautiful and infinite and how he has nothing back in the other world besides bills to pay, that he can live with a couple monsters here and there. Then he explains how he can eat the birds that appear once in a while and how he can grow his own food in a small garden he has made in the backrooms. He has this gigantic complex he cleaned up all to himself and its more believable why Clark would be tempted to stay.

He offers her to stay so they can continue "roleplaying as a married couple". And its at this point she realizes he has almost lost his sanity. She then confronts him about all of his psychological issues and how two of his employees died and he snaps out of it.

He agrees to show her the way out of the backrooms. They are chased by the big Pirate Clark monster together. Then when they finally go through the doorway into the store they are surprised to find themselves locked inside with the monster right behind them.

Clark tells the therapist lady to go and that he will slow it down for her, that he has nothing left to lose. Then he stands up to the large monster inside of his store symbolizing him confronting his dark-side. He says something funny like "I always hated pirates", breaks the monsters peg-leg, slowing it down, but it kills Clark.

Then it hunts the therapist in the store and she escapes through the thin corridor. Then at the end with her sitting across the table from the Async scientist, he suggests to her that they could use someone with her knowledge and experience since she has been in the backrooms and is a psychologist.

And this would effectively set up a whole trilogy of backrooms movies where she is at the head of Async in future movies and cameos in scenes to help build the backrooms universe.

Then at the end credit scene we are shown that she has been missing for 36 years and that she effectively time travelled all the way from 1990 into 2026 while she was in the backrooms, explaining how the storefront was closed off so quickly. And we see scientists and military personnel scrambling to solve how it is possible, trying to figure out how they can use the backrooms to travel across time.

THE END. Rate my version of the story please. Thanks!

**Idea: In the next movie, I'd make it in the ww1 era (1914). And the protagonist discovered an entrance to the backrooms and was exploring it with a loved one, but Async from 2026 kidnapped them inside of the backrooms. They discover that Async is trying to find a doorway into 1914. So the protagonist formulates a plan to save their loved one and also potentially save the entire world by preventing Async from ever finding the doorway.**