Backrooms review

 

Sometimes you can find yourself in one of those shops whose dimensions appear to exceed the space the building occupies. I’ve been in one or two such places and as you start to move away from the hubbub of the entrance, browsing can become a solitary occupation with no other customers around. The further you go, the stranger it can seem. It is this sensation, magnified many times, that Backrooms creates finding scares in such seemingly regular things as walls, rooms, doors and even open space. The debut feature of twenty year old Kane Parsons is an impressively unsettling movie to sit through, one that will make you think twice about roaming off on your own. Like last year’s Weapons it creates an edgy mood that makes the everyday terrifying.

 Some spoilers after the break

 

12 Years a Slave

At cinemas now
Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o, Michael Fassbender
Directed by Steve McQueen

There is no doubt that 12 Years a Slave is a harrowing film that even with our knowledge of acting and effects makes for uncomfortable viewing. It must have been harder to act it but I suppose the rigours that some of the cast had to go through is nothing compared to what the slaves in the story endure. Based on true events the film is set in the mid -1800s where free family man Solomon Northup is tricked into accompanying two supposed entertainers to Washington where he is promised earnings way in excess of the norm for his violin skills. However the men get him drunk and sell him to a slaver. Solomon wakes the following morning in a bare brick walled cell chained to the floor. Thus begins a dozen years of mistreatment and abuse as he is hauled around several owners.