There is less bear footage here than you might expect.
CONTENT WARNING: Violence.
Tag Archives: Horror
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: BACKROOMS (2026)
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DIRECTED BY: Kane Parsons
FEATURING:Renate Reinsve, Chiwetel Ejiofor,
PLOT: A frustrated furniture-store owner discovers a seemingly infinite maze of mysterious rooms in the back of his store, and invites his therapist to help explore them.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Explore the labyrinths of the unconscious in this ambiguous and terrifying psychological horror.
COMMENTS: Clark is a frustrated, divorced wannabe architect barely making ends meet at his crappy furniture store. He drinks too much and is unhappy enough that he goes to see a therapist, Mary, to vent and role-play his breakup with his wife. While investigating an electricity bill that’s much higher than it should be, Clark discovers he can pass through a wall in his basement to enter a maze of backrooms filled with odd phenomena. Mary is skeptical when he tells her of his explorations, but when he fails to show up at a weekly session, she follows him into the backrooms.
Thirty-something furniture salesmen and female psychologists do not seem like the kind of protagonists 20-year old director Kane Parsons would pick to pilot his feature debut film, but herein lies Backrooms‘ genius. Parson wisely outsourced his script to television writer Will Soodik. Soodik delivers an unexpectedly rich scenario that pries into Clark’s insecurities and Mary’s traumatic backstory without fully explaining them, leaving Parsons free to expend his youthful creativity on designing the rooms themselves. The film’s interlocking chambers feature improbable geometries, optical illusions, out-of-place objects like heaps of stacked furniture, piles of laundry, dead birds, sneakers half-submerged in the floor, and so on. The deeper we penetrate into the maze, the more surreal the objects we find—and eventually, people (of a sort) show up. Everything is built wrong, as if misremembered or imagined by an alien intelligence trying to recreate human artifacts based on a stock photo image library, with little understanding of the ways objects actually relate to each other in the physical world. The constructs recall the uncanny, too-many-fingered visions that AI regurgitated only a few years ago. How and why were these created, by whom and for what purpose? The indeterminate grotesqueness of Backrooms simulacra gives the film uncanny power; the resonance with its characters’ psychological flaws imbues it with meaning.
There are two potential pitfalls with Backrooms. The first is the expectations set by locating the film within the horror genre. Backrooms is at its best when dwelling within its own unease: it does not need (many) monsters, stalkers, jump scares, or scenes of bloodletting to liven it up. These elements do show up, but miraculously, the story survives its chase scenes, ending by circling back to its inexplicable roots. A looming issue, however, may be the audience’s insatiable thirst for “lore,” which, if improperly indulged, can lead to the biggest buzzkill of all: “explication.” Backrooms 2 probably would be—and, I strongly fear will be—a terrible idea. As a standalone work, Backrooms beautifully expands upon the promising but narrow premise of the original shorts, adding depth and forming an ambiguously closed circle. Please, don’t push your luck. At the tender age of age 20, Parsons should still have decades of completely original nightmares to dredge up from his fertile unconscious.
Audience notes: The theater was fairly full for a weekday evening showing in the expensive “Xtreme” format. There were no walkouts (with one exception I’ll mention at the end). There were more teenagers there than I expected, sitting in the front rows for an immersive experience, to boot; I should have been able to predict this knowing of Parson’s YouTube audience, but it still surprised me. One parent brought two boys, estimated ages 7-11. The younger got scared in the middle of the film (during a scene where they discover a Christmas tree in a red-lit room) and his mom had to escort him out (I don’t know if he returned later). The older boy was heard to exclaim “that was scary and weird!” when it was all over. I’m considering adoption.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: EGG (2005)
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DIRECTED BY: Yukihiko Tsutsumi
FEATURING: Inuko Inuyama, Hye- yeong Jo, Megumi Ujiie
PLOT: A girl finds herself tormented by the image of a hatching egg whenever she closes her eyes.
COMMENTS: A violent confrontation while introducing a narrative is a tried and tested way to grab the audience’s attention. This method is applied in Egg, and along with erratic editing, rough cuts, many close-ups and zoom-ins, it creates a certain tension. This will be a wild ride, as the story follows a young girl attempting to come to terms with a highly disturbing situation.
The plot revolves around the daily routine of a seemingly ordinary young woman. She has friends, works a nonsensical futuristic job (as in out of the popular TV show ” Severance”), and tries to live a normal life. However, whenever she closes her eyes, her inner world appears, and inside this world is an egg ready to hatch. Tsutsumi’s experience as a visual artist and music video director comes in handy here as he creates an oppressive, eerie, otherworldly inner landscape, with some truly grotesque monsters later on.
Our protagonist’s situation develops into a double confrontation: on the one hand, with the creature lurking inside the egg, and on the other, with a familial legacy of similar cases. The danger represented by the creature transforms into something concrete and physical, as it becomes apparent it doesn’t exist only in her mind, but inside her lower abdomen, as well. And like any baby, it attempts to get out, albeit in a messier than usual way. Light body horror is part of the deal here, but nothing too gruesome. Instead, the film works mostly as a suspense survival thriller, with rich allegorical undertones.
Underneath the lore and imagery is a commentary on female physiology, the nature of pregnancy, and the acceptance (or not) of this seemingly unavoidable reality. In this context, Egg also works as a coming-of-age tale. Early on, a doctor our heroine consults suggests she is still a child, at least mentally, hinting at an upcoming transformation. The use of body horror to comment on themes of pregnancy and female physiology brings to mind the work of Lucile Hadzihalilovic, especially Evolution (2015).
Some light comedic elements are expressed here, mostly through exaggerated acting, but they remain underdeveloped. Ultimately Egg is not a black comedy as much as a deeply and earnestly symbolic J-horror with feminist implications, essential for fans of the art-house and the bizarre.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: A BLIND BARGAIN (2025)
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DIRECTED BY: Paul Bunnell
FEATURING: Jake Horowitz, Crispin Glover, Amy Wright, Lucy Loken, Annalisa Cochrane
PLOT: A Vietnam veteran heroin addict gets hustled into a scheme where his aging ex-actress mother will be a test subject of Dr. Gruder, who promises to reverse aging with some highly unconventional treatments.
COMMENTS: Dominic Fontaine (Jake Horowitz) is a Vietnam veteran now residing in 1970s southern California, and he’s got a few problems. He’s down on his luck, caring for an aging mother, has a heroin addiction, and owes money to mobsters who regularly deliver a few kicks to his ribs to urge him to speed up his payment plan. That convergence of obstacles drives him through the lobby doors of the Gruder Institute and right into the care of one Dr. Gruder (Crispin Glover), with a stop to meet flirty intake nurse Ellie Bannister (Lucy Loken), who takes Dominic’s blood and signs him up for methadone treatments. Luckily, indie audiences are already familiar with heroin recovery practices thanks to Trainspotting. But A Blind Bargain is a quite different movie, where the drug addiction takes a back seat to the other kinds of weirdness going on. (It is also the second movie I can think of, after Naked Lunch, where bugs and drugs fit into the same plot.)
Turns out that analysis of Dominic’s sample shows that his mother’s blood would be valuable for research—valuable enough that the Gruder Institute offers $500 per pint (in 1980 dollars). Dominic’s mom, Joy (veteran actress Amy Wright), who thinks she’s going for spa treatments, happens to be a has-been actress who yearns for her old silent film days. She’s an easy sell for a treatment that restores her youth. From this set-up, we advance into an unpredictable labyrinth of character interactions and a typically gothic mad scientist story.
I should mention that A Blind Bargain is an attempt at remaking / reclaiming an infamously lost film of the same title, released in 1922 as a silent feature starring Lon Chaney. Since I haven’t seen the original (and likely never will without a time machine), I can’t comment to how much of this is faithful to the original script and how much is invented this time around.
For weird movie fans, Glover alone could be enough of a reason to see it; he invests every line and gesture with his unique eccentricity like the master character actor he is. Jake Horowitz is notable as well; infinitely watchable with his steely blue eyes and Zig-Zag-man beard, he plays a convincingly desperate sad-sack without making him a sniveling wimp or a conniving scoundrel. Amy Wright came all the way from Synecdoche, New York to show she can still act circles around the best of them. The early pacing is perfect, with a tempo that takes just enough time with each scene to let us absorb the plot, such that you’re carried right past the odder scenes before you can ask too many questions. The editing, between eccentric old-school screen wipes and music that punctuates the playful quirkiness, hints that we’re in that humor-horror canyon where the movie can make a little fun of itself.
That said, despite a few drug-inspired hallucinations and some impressively off-kilter lines and even dashes of magical realism, the story never ramps up into truly weird territory. I sat waiting for a big shock, an alarming gross-out, a horrifying revelation, but all I got were mildly unexpected moments. The ending is upon us before we’ve quite digested act three, and a great deal is left unexplained, especially romantic tensions that suddenly pop up between several characters. Mad science and body horror are frequent topics in our archives, with many movies that quaff a bigger shot of madness than this one does. Be that as it may, this film seems to be everything its creators intended. A Blind Bargain is comfort quirkiness for the film festival crowd, lovingly made with a zesty pace and a dedication to freaky medical practitioners everywhere.
A Blind Bargain is in limited release at the time of this review. We’ll let you know when it’s widely available.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: MOTHER MARY (2026)
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DIRECTED BY: David Lowery
FEATURING: Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel
PLOT: A pop star seeks out her estranged seamstress to make a new dress for an upcoming performance.
COMMENTS: Mother Mary is a pop singer known for her elaborate costumes featuring halo-styled headdresses (a motif she may have recently abandoned). Now, I don’t know modern pop music from Tuvan throat singing (not quite true—I own a Hun Huur Tu album—but you get the point). But I gather Anne Hathaway’s Mother Mary is supposed to be huge, the type of singer whose trysts with NFL stars get featured on TMZ. The Catholic nomenclature obviously recalls megastar Madonna, while her costuming suggests Taylor Swift by way of Bjork. Critics more familiar with this genre than I am often trot out Lady Gaga as an analogue, along with a number of other names that sound vaguely familiar (vague familiarity being the essential currency of popular music). Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX, and FKA Twigs (who also appears in the film and, coincidentally, also has a Mother Mary role under her belt) supply the generic pop soundtrack.
At any rate, Mother Mary is secretly a wreck. Her last big public performance ended in an embarrassing and concerning platform malfunction, and she’s apparently been in a bit of a slump since. OK, creative crisis, got it. After an unsatisfactory wardrobe session sends her into a crisis of insecurity, she flies off to see her old estranged seamstress, Sam (Coel). What follows is a long sequence of the two women warily circling each other; Sam is not at all happy to see her old friend, but nevertheless passive-aggressively agrees to make her the new dress MM hopes will reignite her creative spark. The film turns into an extended conversation as Sam takes measurements, selects fabrics, and asks her client to do an interpretive dance (without musical accompaniment, because she has sworn a vow to not listen to Mother Mary’s new work). The designer pokes at old resentments, while the idol she helped create desperately (and pathetically) attempts to mend fences. The supernatural twist is divulged about halfway through, but it’s less hauntingly mysterious and more a disappointingly literal metaphor for the women’s shredded relationship. What began as a talky two-hander suddenly turns into In Fabric, but with no humor whatsoever.
It’s no knock on the two principals, who turn in excellent work, but Mother Mary never really finds anything interesting to say about its subject. The best produced parts are the concert clips—which convey a degree of spectacle that suggests why people might actually flock to see the otherwise vapid Mother Mary—and a few ethereal sequences with a flowing red spirit. But the story itself never approaches the profundity of a good Lana Del Rey single. Pop stars are bland, so maybe, by definition, movies about pop stars should be bland—-even when they try to spice things up with bloody symbolism.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: