The two best films I’ve seen in ages weren’t made by filmmakers who climbed the traditional ladder. They weren’t the products of prestigious film schools, years on the festival circuit or decades spent marinating in the accepted canon. They came from the internet. Over the last few months, Backrooms and Obsession bowled me over. Together, these films feel like something bigger than a run of good releases. They feel like the beginning of a generational shift.
Backrooms is the one I can’t shake. It weaponises the uncanny valley, creating a dichotomy of the impending doom of a never-ending nothing landscape which holds the deep, fragmented past of collective meaning alongside the fact that it all means absolutely nothing at all. 
‘It’ being life, culture, trauma, memory: us. Endless fluorescent corridors, sinking carpets, yellowing wallpaper and impossible architecture become terrifying not because anything necessarily happens within them (at first), but because they seem to remember something you don’t. It’s horror built from absence rather than presence. You’re the NPC trapped inside a video game of your mind. There’s already been plenty written about Kane Parsons – better known online as Kane Pixels, the YouTube phenomenon who, at 20 years old, became A24’s youngest-ever feature director. His original Backrooms shorts, inspired by creepypasta mythology, amassed millions of views before Hollywood came calling. I keep coming back to Parsons admitting he hadn’t seen Blue Velvet to Backrooms star Renate Reinsve, after she remarked how Lynchian Backrooms felt to her. The comparisons are obvious, but Parsons arrived there unconsciously. Maybe he encountered fragments buried in a Reddit thread, a 4chan post or a YouTube recommendation shaped by someone else’s obsession. That’s how culture moves now. Influence no longer travels neatly from film school to filmmaker; it ricochets through the internet until nobody quite remembers where it began.
The same goes for Curry Barker, who directed Obsession at just 26. Like Parsons, Barker built his career online, making horror shorts with friends before stepping into features. Neither filmmaker fits the old idea of the cine-literate auteur, yet both understand exactly how contemporary audiences process emotion. Their films move with the rhythm and instinct of the highly online. Rather than feeling undereducated, their work is liberated. Obsession is subversive. It gets culture talking from every angle, with sharp observations of contemporary relationships dynamics in a messy online age.
They’re conversation pieces, generation box office sales.
There’s a temptation, particularly among film people, to measure the new guard against the same old checklists. Did they go to the right school? Have they seen the right films? Pauline Kael was always suspicious of that kind of orthodoxy. She cared about whether a film surprised you. Whether it had a libido. That’s exactly what these films have. Perhaps the strangest twist is that they’re also doing something Hollywood has spent years struggling to achieve. In a post-woke, post-franchise landscape where studios seem terrified of taking creative risks, these films are pulling audiences back into cinemas. They’re conversation pieces, generating box office sales (of immense scale) and proving that originality still has commercial value, not because they’re rejecting cinema’s past, but because they aren’t approaching filmmaking in those terms at all. But perhaps, like the great post-war modernists, these boys are wrestling with the same existential questions, only at a hundred times the speed, with black-and-white film stock swapped out for a lifetime spent online. They understand the key factor of cinema, its language of image, character and symbolism. Perhaps Berlin is as good a place as any to see this new wave in action. In a city whose cinemas, clubs and online communities have always been unusually receptive to the strange, Backrooms and Obsession feel less like imports from Hollywood than part of a conversation already happening. And maybe, without the weight of the industry’s inherited rules and endless internal discourse hanging over them, they’re free to make subversive, transgressive, knockout films.
