Are you sitting uncomfortably? How Backrooms upended the horror movie

It was just a creepy picture on the internet. Now it’s the year’s freakiest film. Its 20-year-old auteur Kane Parsons and stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve take us through the terrifying labyrinth Chiwetel Ejiofor has been on a lot of movie sets, but Backrooms was something different: a 30,000 sq ft labyrinth of apparently random corridors and chambers, all carpeted, fluorescent lit and decorated in the same sickly yellow wallpaper. It was so big that people were getting lost in it, says Ejiofor: “Especially on those first days. As you try to navigate your way around and you’re like: ‘I’m sure it’s this door, I’m sure that’s the way.’” He’s laughing at the recollection. “And you find yourself just back in the wrong corner of the whole studio and you’re like: ‘Get me some help!’” This is kind of the point of Backrooms – the movie and the online phenomenon that spawned it. It’s a concept that takes some unpacking, but as the premise for a buzzy A24 horror freakout, ...

‘I was making a film about the trauma of an entire country’: director Alice Winocour on her movie about the 2015 Paris terror attacks

After her brother was caught up in the Bataclan siege, Winocour wanted to address the events that had scarred France. She explains why she focused on the aftermath, not the violence

Even from the safety of her home, the film-maker Alice Winocour’s experience of the Paris terror attacks in November 2015 was terrifying. Her younger brother, Jérémie, was hiding in a back room at the Bataclan concert hall, and forbade her from texting him in case it gave away his location. She had to wait to hear that he made it out alive. Later, he told her about a random thought he had while waiting to die: that he had left a half-eaten yoghurt open in the fridge. What would whoever found it make of his poor kitchen hygiene?

It is a touch of human absurdity that resurfaces in Paris Memories, her new film, about the 13 November attacks. Unlike the recent Jean Dujardin film November, it completely ignores religion and largely passes over the bloodshed. Instead, it joins films such as You Will Not Have My Hate and One Year, One Night to wade through the aftermath. The French title Revoir Paris gets it: starring Benedetta’s Virginie Efira as Mia, a radio translator caught in the crossfire in a cafe, the film focuses on how she reconstructs her memories of that night and with them her inner harmony, as well as that of the city of lights.

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