Chiwetel is divorced and depressed, living in his discount furniture shop, until he discovers a world beneath the world, with layers and layers of increasingly corrupted copies of the ground floor, like Us squared. Text is reversed or mutated, everything’s clipping into the walls, people have the wrong number of eyes, like a discount AI office park. Chiwetel gets his employees involved in documenting and mapping (leading to too much period-accurate VHS footage), then they disappear in there.

Every horror movie needs a couple of dummies to kill off. These two are TV stars from Shrinking (also about a therapist) and the Jodie Foster season of True Detective:

Anyone who has played dungeon games on Apple II knows how to deal with the backrooms:

Cut to the perspective of his therapist Renate, who makes a solo wellness check and manages to find Chiwetel, who is thriving in the backrooms. But she should’ve realized from the crayon wall drawings that her patient had gone ’round the bend, and he should’ve realized that the movie’s gonna become a therapy-backstory drama for a while. He tries to escape this by kidnapping her and showing her around to his new (edible) friends.

Finally we get back to proper horror when Carl is eaten by Giant Pirate Carl, who chases the therapist through ever more messed-up environments, until her apparent rescue by some white guys. We’ve seen these guys before, running their own backrooms explorations, setting up A/V equipment and apparently alarm-activated canisters of gas-that-does-nothing. Movie ends with her being interrogated by Phil, who does not imply that she’ll be safe or released, reminding me of the “rescue” at the end of 28 Years Later.