He's a bitter man and is trying to come to terms with things through therapy with Dr Kline (Renate Reinsve) but with little success.
The electrics in the store (where he also lives) are weird and when he goes down to check the breakers one night he sees light emanating through an impossibly thin discontinuity in an otherwise plain wall. When he starts looking for the source he literally falls through the wall as if it isn't there.
No good will come of this.
CW: weird as fuck
This is the famous viral video series from Kane Parsons translated to the big screen.
On paper this is a hard sell. It's just a load of weird architecturally nonsensical rooms filled with detritus, lots of it old furniture that's as nonsensical as the rooms, that eerily go on forever and have some kind of presence lurking. How long can you play with that?
Wisely he's taken two great actors, explores their characters' lives a bit, drops them into the maze and focuses on the existential horror of exploring a broken world made from a limited palette.
The shady Async Research Institute investigating the Backrooms gets a little screen time but you don't need to know anything about the original series, it's just there to establish that this is not the first time somebody has been there.
Nothing is resolved, nothing much happens but what does really hits and it has a hugely unsettling vibe of the kind I want injected straight into my veins, 10/10 but maybe 6/10 for a lot of people. It's notable that in its third week at the cinema the screening I saw was well attended. So its word of mouth referral rate must be astonishing.