The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - October 31, 2026


PREVIEW： Film Review ｜ Backrooms

Breakfast With Beau ｜ Friday 30th October 2026 PREVIEW： Epochs #287 ｜ The Topography of Rome

Episode Stats


Length

25 minutes

Words per minute

180.06

Word count

4,605

Sentence count

—

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hello there beautiful people and welcome to this review of the back rooms and
00:00:19.060 we found ourselves in them big empty spaces Connor are you scared I am I'm terrified watching this
00:00:26.540 entire film like the screaming giga chad thing over it's like oh the room is so large i can't
00:00:31.500 take it ah this will be a review a bit like the maholand drive one where harry really enjoyed it
00:00:37.180 yeah yeah i re i really like this and i was inspired to do this um both as a reaction to
00:00:43.400 some of the stuff that's going on in hollywood right now where hollywood is as a geographical
00:00:48.140 location the center of filmmaking in america actually breaking apart right now i covered
00:00:53.660 it on the podcast recently where the studios are either going to start moving to texas or they're
00:00:59.840 taking completely different approaches to how the films are produced and one of the ways that
00:01:05.060 they're doing that is that they are starting to look for these smaller indie filmmakers
00:01:09.440 who are basing their ideas off of internet memes and creepypastas and they have come from a youtube
00:01:18.460 or social media content production background and they are hitting up these guys and going
00:01:24.200 we'll give you a million dollars we'll give you a few million dollars and that is because of the
00:01:28.260 success of obsession which we reviewed and was one of the reasons we decided to do this review
00:01:33.240 and also back rooms which back room obsession famously watch our review of that it's a really
00:01:40.000 great video you'll love it great film yeah great film uh was made for what 750 000 something like
00:01:46.540 that and made over 400 million dollars back back rooms this film also made by a youtube short
00:01:53.960 filmmaker got called kane parsons who used to go by kane pixel who actually does go by kane pixels
00:02:01.940 21 years old right now short filmmaker on youtube use blender and such actually spread the idea of
00:02:09.640 the back rooms through his short films that he made on youtube from the age of 16 onwards
00:02:14.380 gets given less than 10 million dollars to make the back rooms as a feature film
00:02:19.040 under a24s the distribution company and the production company and it makes almost 400
00:02:25.640 million dollars so this is the second biggest success story of 2026 studios are seeing that
00:02:32.340 and they're saying hold up there's a lot of money to be made here and there's a creative vision that
00:02:38.080 these guys are bringing that is capturing people's imaginations that we can't get hold of anymore and
00:02:43.220 And also, it taps into the generational consciousness that hasn't been represented either behind
00:02:48.940 or in front of the camera, because California is a cultural bubble and they have the worst 0.98
00:02:55.640 excesses of shit-lib millennial politics. 0.97
00:02:58.660 Obsession resonated with both of us and a lot of Zoomers, both male and female alike, 0.98
00:03:03.200 because it showed the worst of Gen Z dating dynamics. 1.00
00:03:07.580 Backrooms doesn't reflect the Zoomer experience. 0.98
00:03:10.320 I mean it's set in the 90s and there are no such young characters in it
00:03:13.520 but what it does do is it is inextricable from being a digital native
00:03:18.420 and one of the things I took away from it, if we're going to discuss the themes
00:03:22.800 I think with a highly experimental film like this
00:03:27.260 the subtext and themes are one of the most important things that it's trying to convey
00:03:32.420 Per the Marshall McLuhan famous quote, the medium is the message
00:03:36.360 the backrooms themselves reflect the internet forums which produce the creepypastas and how
00:03:43.060 as digital natives we are all creatures of the internet if you give your life over to the
00:03:48.120 perverse incentives or the temptations of the digital world then you become sort of unrecognizable
00:03:52.740 and how if you have this sort of collaborative project where everyone is feeding their consciousness
00:03:57.480 into it all the time there's no message discipline it's it's so dispersed and it's knowledge
00:04:02.200 gathering it's impossible to have some kind of form to it then things start to become incongruous
00:04:07.760 incoherent and disorienting so the the premise the world of backrooms is inextricable from
00:04:14.380 the zoomer experience even if the film isn't about zoomers well i think uh kane parsons the script
00:04:20.520 itself was not written by kane parsons so this isn't a um a obsession type deal where it's a
00:04:27.880 writer director this is uh Kane Parsons directs a film based off of the short stories that he'd
00:04:34.260 already made for YouTube and the script was written by a man called William Sudick who if
00:04:39.120 I check out right here has been active since at least 2013 and has written for television programs
00:04:45.960 like oh here you go Homeland, Borgia, Ash vs Evil Dead which is a great show and you should give it
00:04:52.560 watch if you get the chance and westworld so it's kane parsons adapting that script but i think
00:04:58.300 given that he's so young i mean he's 21 right now he would have been 20 when the film was being
00:05:01.920 was being produced and 20 when it was released as well he is through his direction through his
00:05:07.900 creative decisions bringing a very zoomer perspective onto this and i that's a very
00:05:13.500 interesting take uh regarding the internet forums and the digital natives how you can say that part
00:05:20.260 of what's being uh being shown here is the kind of like potential false imprint of your own life
00:05:26.980 the fake memory of you that exists on social media kind of similar to um the black mirror
00:05:33.320 episode uh where have you watched much black mirror yeah loads of it yeah yeah uh the episode
00:05:38.580 with my doppelganger domino gleason oh yes where he dies in the car crash and so she keeps her
00:05:43.400 goombart husband in the attic yeah they clone him out of his social media activity and it's
00:05:47.820 close for a time but the differences between what you only experience on social media versus the
00:05:55.420 real thing are are you can't miss them after a long enough time when she starts to realize oh
00:06:02.280 you are just like a caricature you're a shadow outline of who my husband was well this is how
00:06:08.080 people develop psychosis just talking to ai because ai is trained on thousands of conversations
00:06:13.760 that other people have had on reddit and those conversations are projections of their own
00:06:19.440 personality that might not always be authentic and their interaction with the internet tailors
00:06:25.480 their cadence and the content of what they put out in a certain way because the medium is the
00:06:30.720 message and so when people have these conversations with ai it not just reflects what they want to
00:06:34.360 hear back at them but they develop a kind of psychosis because they're then they know they're
00:06:38.620 not talking to an actual person and so the the friction between the the delusion they're living
00:06:44.100 out and reality starts to erode away at their mind and so you get people that have parasocial
00:06:49.100 relationships they are you start people start developing paranoias about it they start and
00:06:53.240 especially if you're disconnected from real world feedback you start retreating into this very
00:06:57.220 precious consensus reality bubble and the moment reality threatens to penetrate it you like lash
00:07:01.760 out violently so the internet can induce these kinds of delusions when you're living in a
00:07:06.000 simulacra world and the the the physical architecture of back rooms is it's really
00:07:10.600 unsettling if you are living in a world that's a proxy of our own and you it doesn't even need to
00:07:16.220 be that different it just needs to be that things are slightly different sizes or things are um out
00:07:21.000 of place where they aren't normally and it it's got absurd architecture where there seems to be
00:07:25.860 an arch above a door that stops halfway through so it can go to a more rigid right angled
00:07:30.700 architecture and the door leads to a corridor which seems to be wider than the door would
00:07:35.600 you would expect going through the door you know like weird angles to the rooms there are just
00:07:40.360 funnels leading to tiny doors like alice in wonderland all over the place there are sofas
00:07:44.780 like half sunk into the carpet but the carpet itself is not quicksand so that's all that's
00:07:49.700 that's all really interesting i have a particularly different take on it but just to finish off
00:07:53.620 regarding all of the stuff going on with a new approach to filmmaking or choosing creatives how
00:07:59.820 they're sourcing directors and creatives to make these things uh if they are able to
00:08:07.860 capitalize on the success of this of obsession uh i really don't mind this being the new thing
00:08:15.440 because this felt as as did obsession way more like a real film than lots of stuff that you see
00:08:23.040 put out these days because it isn't being completely subsumed by the studio system
00:08:27.960 and because it isn't suffering from the same
00:08:30.240 enormous bloat that something like
00:08:32.320 the Marvel Cinematic Universe is
00:08:34.000 with Doomsday coming up later this year
00:08:36.340 where it's just a complete Hail Mary
00:08:38.340 to go like, everything that we've done
00:08:40.320 since Endgame has basically been an
00:08:42.300 enormous bomb, let's get
00:08:44.320 Robert Downey Jr. back, let's get
00:08:46.260 Chris Evans back, get the whole team back
00:08:48.120 so that we can see if we can salvage something from
00:08:50.320 this. You can't feel the studio meta politics
00:08:52.180 coming through the screen, it's not the same recycled
00:08:54.120 actors that you've seen over and over again even though
00:08:56.220 you've got um i can't pronounce his name it's like chai will edifor has the as the main protagonist
00:09:00.040 i think it's showetal ajafor there we go he was in 12 years a slave he does great strange and in
00:09:05.840 strange yeah mentioning the mcu he does a really good performance so i agree with you in that the
00:09:10.180 film feels authentic the thing that i can praise it for is its sound direction its art direction
00:09:15.300 the the the physical um setscapes that they're they're performing on all of that was great my
00:09:22.440 problems were with the story but if we get more of these films made by authentic like auteur
00:09:29.560 filmmakers then the quality of film will go up regardless of whether or not the story itself
00:09:34.840 is substantive yeah well that's that's the thing what my my essential point is that uh yeah if this
00:09:41.220 is the kind of because i really enjoyed this film and i'll get into the reasons in a few minutes
00:09:45.100 um i really enjoyed this film so if they can make stuff of this quality if you can make stuff of the
00:09:49.920 quality of obsession i don't mind them doing adaptations of creepypastas if they can get
00:09:56.740 something of this quality then i am two thumbs up looking forward to the jeff the killer movie
00:10:01.460 i am two thumbs up looking forward to the mandela catalog or scp containment breach maybe they can
00:10:07.880 actually make a slender man movie because it didn't suck exactly we don't have to exist within the the
00:10:13.260 kind of like slender man creepypasta adaptation uh world we can have it so that people who grew
00:10:18.760 up with these things who understand the significance of them are able to make those films instead and
00:10:24.900 make something worthwhile out of them because frankly whether or not you ended up enjoying
00:10:28.340 the film or not being able to make a project like this out of what originated as oh look at this
00:10:33.620 creepy picture of a liminal space on 4chan on 4chan yeah literally on 4chan is very very
00:10:39.980 impressive so moving on to the actual review of the film as often happens with these things you
00:10:46.560 can see that connor and i are diametrically opposed to one another i being the uh the high
00:10:52.160 class uh snob that i am really enjoyed this uh you being you know a low class what a plot enjoyer
00:11:00.620 uh didn't didn't have quite the same effect for you i really like it when my character motivations
00:11:05.440 are laid out to me in a massive exposition dump in uh 10 minutes at a dinner table it's really
00:11:10.280 compelling hey hey listen man i think for how little plot there was in this film stretched
00:11:15.980 out over almost two hours it did a lot with a little so for context for those of you who don't
00:11:21.220 know the back rooms they've been adapted into short stories by this guy Kane Parsons they have
00:11:25.660 been adapted into video games and other mediums as well but they originally started as a photograph
00:11:32.320 posted on 4chan of a strange liminal space liminal in this case meaning uh empty and abandoned
00:11:39.640 looking with nobody there of yellow hallways looking through a yellow doorway and people
00:11:46.620 didn't know where the photograph originally came from it was originally posted in 2019
00:11:49.980 turned out in 2024 that it was a photo taken from 2002 in a Wisconsin former furniture store while
00:11:58.160 the new tenant was renovating the site and had been posted on the store's blog so actually it
00:12:02.840 feels like given that the main character shawet elijah falls uh clark was um was the owner of a
00:12:09.960 furniture store feels like a little bit of a call back to the origins of that after this took off
00:12:16.280 and took off on social media it became part of the whole like liminal space ooh isn't a big empty
00:12:21.620 space scary craze which frankly i never got into i i okay i understand it for evolutionary reasons
00:12:28.460 because human beings like
00:12:30.300 soft light because it reminds you of fire
00:12:32.300 a happy medium between
00:12:34.540 not claustrophobic but not so
00:12:36.540 wide open that predators can hide
00:12:38.460 and ambush you from somewhere
00:12:39.860 this is why if anyone's had the misfortune of being
00:12:42.480 through reading train station before
00:12:44.220 sweeping wide open areas
00:12:46.660 is soul crushing
00:12:48.520 you feel very exposed
00:12:50.000 yeah it's horrible
00:12:51.840 and also I did find it interesting that the
00:12:54.640 the concept of the back rooms
00:12:56.300 is an indictment as i said earlier on the fact that all it takes for a space to be horrifying
00:13:01.760 is to emulate our living conditions accurately and just rearrange some of the furniture or the
00:13:07.960 sizes of things because it is a commentary to say that the way that we're living now is
00:13:11.980 anachronistic and not conducive to human well-being like the fluorescent lights the
00:13:17.060 hollow like really stark colors the fact that everything's sort of threadbare and
00:13:21.760 almost engineer for maximal commercial property and so it might just be an indictment of not just
00:13:29.620 the extent to which like architecture has betrayed human beings ability to live around beauty and
00:13:34.760 around comfort but also if if we want to undo that unsettling nature of our environment the
00:13:40.620 amount of stuff we're going to have to demolish and remodel is itself a daunting prospect yeah i
00:13:46.140 mean it just goes to highlight the artificiality of it as you can see from the sort of background
00:13:50.540 that we have here the fluorescent lights are a big theme that's something i appreciated about
00:13:55.940 the film was the fact that the film uh had actual color grading to it you could differentiate part
00:14:01.860 which which space that you're in based on the color grading it had lighting to it where it
00:14:06.980 wasn't just so flatly lit like what was it that wicked two that came out that everybody ripped
00:14:11.760 on because the lighting was flat and there was no shadows or expressiveness in it but when you
00:14:16.200 mention the similarity between the spaces i mean we're in a very artificial space right now one of
00:14:21.860 the best moments of the film for me was later on when uh the the secret main character mary who is
00:14:27.420 the last girl of the film in a fit in a film that only really has four characters very similar to
00:14:32.500 obsession she ends up being the last one surviving um when she climbs out of the enormous pit that
00:14:41.700 looked almost like a panopticon which ties into some of the themes um that i'll explore in a few 0.98
00:14:47.880 minutes she's in that enormous pit she climbs up through the ceiling and she emerges in what 0.95
00:14:53.380 appears to be the furniture store that clark has been living in where the gateway to the back rooms
00:14:59.160 initially opened except she's not she's actually still in the back rooms which has created this
00:15:06.180 enormous version of the store as part of its kind of subsuming all of human existence into this
00:15:14.600 fake um poorly uh poorly remembered shadow reality but you can't tell at first i mean i knew that
00:15:23.920 that was what was happening because it would be very obvious as part of the scale oh she's not
00:15:26.980 out of it yet obviously she's not out of it yet but from an in-universe perspective the fact that
00:15:31.560 you can't tell the difference between these big fake spaces in the real world and the big fake
00:15:37.320 spaces in the back rooms is saying something it's saying something that i find quite creepy
00:15:43.640 the the horror of the back rooms is the very real spatial alienation that we feel in our everyday
00:15:48.600 lives it's the same thing with um the scene in fight club where he's populating his apartment
00:15:53.880 with all of the replaceable ikea furniture there's a there's a level of soullessness to it and you're
00:16:00.020 moving from your floodlit corporate office to your uh corporate decorated apartment and you're
00:16:07.400 you're you're going between without ever experiencing anything that nourishes your spirit
00:16:11.920 yes so for for the plot it's very simple uh shawetel aijafor is playing clark who runs a
00:16:20.620 furniture shop he's living in the furniture shop right now because he's been kicked out of his home
00:16:25.020 by his wife Barbara yeah his wife Barbara and is going to see a therapist it becomes clear that he
00:16:32.440 had a drinking problem that he is trying to get a hold of but hasn't completely got a handle on just
00:16:37.540 yet and it seems what broke them up through the dialogue that we see in the therapy sessions
00:16:44.160 is that he couldn't keep a handle on his anger and he became very resentful of the fact that
00:16:50.320 She was going to university to try to study to make her dreams come true,
00:16:55.160 and he had basically had to put his life on hold and run this rubbish furniture shop
00:16:58.540 so that he could pay for everything for them.
00:17:01.540 The furniture shop also does not seem to be doing particularly well financially.
00:17:05.940 Well, his branding's pretty poor because it's Captain Clark's Ottoman Emporium,
00:17:09.760 and as one of the employees, he points out,
00:17:13.000 are you meant to be a pirate? Are you meant to be a sultan?
00:17:15.860 Like, what's going on here?
00:17:17.560 And so, clearly having an identity issue.
00:17:20.320 The other thing that I found quite interesting, and obviously this is made explicit in the dining table conversation that happens later in the film,
00:17:26.920 is the film, it seems to be saying that the back rooms are the physical spaces we have to live in that are created when we repress or ignore our own shortcomings, our vices.
00:17:41.720 We indulge in our own bad behaviours because the entire reason that he goes to live in the furniture store in the first place
00:17:46.980 is because he has been pushing his resentment to one side
00:17:49.740 and sort of compartmentalizing it
00:17:50.960 and drinking to get away from it
00:17:52.040 because he's got a soul-crushing existence.
00:17:53.640 He's running a failing furniture store.
00:17:55.100 He resents his wife for him paying for her to go to university
00:17:57.820 and her getting a better job than he has
00:17:59.480 and them indefinitely deferring the timetable
00:18:02.160 at which they have children.
00:18:03.440 And so that repression causes the argument
00:18:05.640 that then puts him in the physical place
00:18:07.420 at the furniture store,
00:18:08.200 which is then replicating his life in the back rooms
00:18:11.680 and turning it into this sort of austere mirror image of it,
00:18:15.320 this dark reflection.
00:18:16.060 the back room seems to be a very explicit youngian shadow world wherein our own shadow
00:18:22.600 selves manifest yes or at least some kind of facsimile of those shadow selves manifest and
00:18:29.140 it's most clear within clark it's clark himself which we'll get on to either way you know he's
00:18:36.000 he's filming advertisements uh for it because it's going nowhere it's a failing shop and one night
00:18:42.280 while he's there um he gets drawn downstairs because the shop has been experiencing power
00:18:48.960 issues and when he goes to go and check the breakers it seems that some kind of extra breakers
00:18:55.300 have clipped into the wall into the wall panel which confuses the electrician they have no idea
00:19:01.160 where it is he goes to check out what's going on downstairs one night after he sees cctv footage
00:19:08.280 of the back rooms on television so it seems like the shadow realm is creeping into his reality
00:19:14.840 and he's drawn into the back rooms where he clips through the wall he phases through the wall
00:19:19.680 part of the original idea of the back rooms as far as i remember was that you clip through reality
00:19:26.020 like in a video game when you no clip it's like the area in skyrim and windhelm where you run
00:19:30.420 through and then you drop down below the outer walls of windhelm and you can find the secret
00:19:33.980 chest with with all of the developer um contents in it yeah so so in that original imagining it's
00:19:40.260 kind of like the developers unused assets room in the real world except you get trapped in it and
00:19:47.580 you're unsure on whether anything is actually in there or not so he goes in there he explores
00:19:52.700 the little cold open of the film is from cct sorry from a camcorder footage appears to be
00:20:01.060 somebody in there researching exploring what's going on and he gets caught by a monster in there
00:20:06.540 that you don't see at first and we're assuming that he's killed so the first time he explores
00:20:12.880 through it does quite a good job i would say of building the tension because he's going through
00:20:18.100 these creepy empty halls the spaces are off it switches from one to another these very tight
00:20:24.740 claustrophobic narrow corridors where you feel really pinned in there are these strange as i
00:20:30.500 mentioned before little cubby holes off to the side where you get tiny little alice in wonderland
00:20:35.800 doors that you can go through and then it alternates between those and these big wide open rooms
00:20:40.700 massive piles of furniture in the middle for no reason massive piles of furniture all clipping
00:20:45.020 into each other or stuck together or or it is just empty stark and empty and it feels very exposed so
00:20:53.360 through that you know from the cold open that there is something there so it saves these scenes
00:20:59.540 for me from just being a guy walking around a big empty space and the use of the music as well
00:21:05.420 helps to build tension there's an additional for those who haven't seen the film yet and aren't
00:21:09.660 persuaded there's an additional 16 minute um short film version which the director produced as a kind
00:21:17.220 of multimedia accompaniment in the same vein as continuing the web series of the back rooms that
00:21:21.300 spawn the film and it's called uh back rooms everything must go because that's the slogan on
00:21:26.200 the furniture store because the furniture store is in such financial dire straits they're selling
00:21:29.680 everything off and it shows the teams from the research group in the hazmat suits exploring
00:21:36.580 the back rooms before they encounter the largest monster that's in there before one of them ends
00:21:43.280 up running in the opening of the film um to the research station where he tries to call the rest
00:21:48.160 of his team for extraction and the monster catches up with him so it is actually that they're captured
00:21:52.240 by i suppose we can call him captain clark yeah they're captured by by captain clark and there's
00:21:57.980 a lot of discussion um at the beginning of the film in the therapy session where mary the therapist
00:22:03.000 is saying about how we build these pathways in our brains from when we're children that stay for
00:22:07.720 the rest of our lives she's holding on to you see a flashback to her childhood home being demolished
00:22:14.160 which is relevant later and where her and what appears to be a sibling or a friend put their
00:22:19.800 hands in the concrete while it was drying and when it was demolished she seems to have taken
00:22:24.260 that old handprint of her own and uh kept it with her so she's very literally physically holding
00:22:31.000 on to a token of her past she's holding on to that childhood memory that version of herself
00:22:36.500 it's an impression of the home she once had much like the architecture of back rooms yes and later
00:22:41.500 on in the film it becomes very clear that clark has been this way since he was very young these
00:22:47.620 of patterns of behavior holding on to repressed emotions resenting other people pushing them away
00:22:53.400 before they can hurt him this was something that he held it on to from uh from being a child and
00:22:59.860 that's what the film seems to suggest as well when he keeps insisting he is an architect
00:23:03.920 it's the the the things that he builds are a consequence of the memories he represses the
00:23:10.060 the anger that comes out in outbursts or else manifests in the jungian shadow realm of the
00:23:14.980 back rooms the physical architecture of his failures are the liminal spaces of the back rooms
00:23:19.400 yes and the almost the truest representation of himself and what he's yearning for
00:23:24.640 comes out through captain clark which is this kind of childish um childish monster that roams
00:23:34.100 hurting people without truly understanding why especially when they seem to be trying to reach
00:23:39.780 out as happens later on when
00:23:41.720 Clark himself seems to be trying to reach out
00:23:43.920 to his younger
00:23:45.760 self and gets pushed away
00:23:47.340 in a sense. You even get that imagery
00:23:49.800 when Clark's going through, no when
00:23:51.700 Mary enters the back rooms for the first time later
00:23:53.760 in the film where there's that mural
00:23:55.680 that it's unclear whether
00:23:57.700 Clark or his shadow self
00:23:59.660 has done the mural on the wall. It's like a
00:24:01.780 child's drawing. It is like a child's drawing and
00:24:03.800 it's like he says he's opened a
00:24:05.780 window because she tells him early in the film
00:24:07.760 in a nice little callback to open a window after he's gone crazy because the first time he goes
00:24:13.000 through the back rooms he tries to show her except she doesn't believe him so he's like i'm
00:24:17.280 gonna get proof and then it all goes wrong from there it all gets very blair witch very very
00:24:22.220 blair witch but um the image is almost like him being thrown into the air like a child would
00:24:28.840 by a parent except by the child version of himself so it's like this repressed desire for
00:24:34.520 him to infantilize himself and return to that earlier more innocent state of being before all
00:24:41.440 of his troubles manifested themselves as alcoholism through hurting other people through pushing his
00:24:47.420 wife away and situations like that um which i which i found to be very good if you would like
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