Movies
Sight (V)
“If Ahlbrandt had spent half as much time scripting this film as he did setting up the lighting and splicing footage, he might have wound up with a much better production.”
If the eyes are the windows to the soul, how does one go about making a soulless film called SIGHT?
Jeffrey sees dead people. One day, Jeffrey meets Dana. Dana also sees dead people. Could be a match made in heaven, but since this is a horror film, things aren’t looking too bright for these intrepid souls—and that’s not just the desaturated lighting scheme talking. See, Dana has an ex-boyfriend Paul, and Paul doesn’t like Jeffrey. In fact, when Dana calls Jeffrey for help, and winds up spending the night at his apartment, her Ex comes over with a baseball bat and leaves Jeffrey in a coma for over a year. When Jeffrey finally wakes up, and tries to piece together what happened, no one can find any trace of Dana or Paul.
Someone needs to tell Adam Ahlbrandt to learn how to delegate—for the sake of his career. As the Writer, Director, Cinematographer, Editor and Composer on this film, he’s set himself up as the fall guy for virtually everything that could go wrong with a feature. I mean, no one blames the Producer or Actor when a film looks bad, sounds bad, is cut bad or is chock full of banal dialogue. But they do blame those other guys. To be fair, SIGHT doesn’t have all these problems, but man…the ones it does have are killing it.
Let’s start on the positive points. It’s obvious that Ahlbrandt is a student of J-Horror and in that manner; he populates his film with a collection of really creepy ghosts, most of which have blue skin, wet hair and float a few centimeters above the ground—just high enough that their pointed toes ever so gently scrape the floors of their haunts. It’s textbook stuff, but on a budget, it’s effective and well executed. Plus the make-up is well done and the spooks are generally spooky. The concept of the story is interesting at the outset, but it misses the bus so many times that by the end, the film is concluding a storyline that began at the half-way point and ignoring the one they started at the beginning. Is it confusing? Maybe not as much as your typical J-horror film, but yeah…it’s confusing. Also in typical J-horror fashion, the film is a talk fest, with the final explanation and action arriving just moments before the whole thing is thankfully over. So, if those were the positives—properly aping the pluses and minuses of Asian Horror Films—then you can see where the problems are gonna start to pile up.
To begin with, there is a world of difference between Sound Design and Sound Mixing and in that world Doug Sakmann’s got some explaining to do. Doug used to be the head of production at Troma and over the past few years he’s been churning out some fun, psychotic and pornographic microbudget genre films like PUNK ROCK HOLOCAUST 1 & 2 and RE-PENETRATOR. None of these films sound as bad as SIGHT. Want to know why? Cause Doug Sakmann didn’t do the sound on them! SIGHT suffers from the most extreme jumps in sound quality of any film I can remember seeing at this moment. It goes from a whisper to a scream from a mumble to a screech in jarring blasts that had me repeatedly cranking the volume up and down to keep my eardrums intact. If the sound mix is designed to scare the living shit out of you, congratulations guys, here’s to a job well done.
The other problem comes from the fact that, even though the film tries to conclude its story as a mystery, it never really clarifies why Jeffrey or Dana can see dead people. In THE SIXTH SENSE we didn’t need it explained because the point was who was dead. In STIR OF ECHOES we see dead people so we can solve the murder. SIGHT seems to want to follow that path, but the ending is so left-field it almost makes you forget the connection the two main characters had to begin with. The film’s ultimate breaking point is that other than a show reels for Ahlbrandt’s Cinematography and Editing skills—which the film feels like—SIGHT fails as a cohesive and compelling tale.
It makes no difference if Adam Ahlbrandt can craft a visually interesting film full of Hollywood styled jump scares and flash cuts if he has nothing interesting to say. Of course some loony studio exec just greenlit a sequel to Tarsem’s film THE CELL, which also has no story to go along with it’s visuals, so what do I know! Still, I’ll tell you this much. If Ahlbrandt had spent half as much time scripting this film as he did setting up the lighting and splicing footage, he might have wound up with a much better production.
The iconic line “If you build it, they will come” may have originally referred to a baseball field, but I’d argue that the record-breaking success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms is proof that the line could also refer to well-crafted movies about ideas that young cinemagoers actually care about.
Yet, despite being based on Parsons’ existing ARG/Webseries, the A24-produced film is more of a standalone tale exploring the personal implications of the titular rooms rather than a traditional examination of the hard sci-fi elements present in the source material.
This less lore-reliant approach was a genius move, as the resulting film ended up being equally accessible to both existing fans and newcomers alike. That’s not to say that Backrooms doesn’t engage with the existing mythology in new and interesting ways, however, as the film heavily expands on the Async Research Institute and the cryptobiology of the rooms themselves. With that in mind, I’m diving a little deeper into these connections in order to help fledgling Backrooms enthusiasts find their way around the yellow labyrinth.
As is to be expected from this kind of article, there are major spoilers ahead, so proceed at your own risk if you’ve yet to see the movie!
Who is Async Research Institute in the Backrooms Movie?
Backrooms. Courtesy of A24.
Of course, if we’re going to discuss the connections between the series and the film, a good place to start would be Async itself. The California-based Foundation plays a brief yet pivotal role in the film as outside observers that only really interfere with the main plot during the final act. While the Foundation is the main focus of the ARG, they’re mostly hinted at in the film.
Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Clark runs into several Async-built “anomaly lures” during his exploration of the liminal space (mostly in the form of human-shaped cut-outs accompanied by audio recordings inspired by the 1977 Voyager Golden Record), as well as surveillance cameras and evidence that at least one of their agents has become trapped in the rooms – though we’ll get to this last detail later.
It’s only towards the end of the flick that Foundation agents finally show up in their iconic yellow protection suits and “rescue” Renate Reinsve’s Mary by pulling her back to “reality” through a familiar portal, though it’s heavily implied that they might not be all that concerned with her well-being.
After all, long-time fans are aware that Async has been researching the “Complex” (their official name for the Backrooms phenomenon) since at least the late 1980s, with their Threshold experiments being based on a Low-Proximity Magnetic Distortion System prototype developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1982. Unfortunately, their experiments have likely resulted in hidden portals appearing more frequently in the outside world, which consequently leads to more people accidentally “no-clipping through reality”. And that’s not even mentioning the occasional earthquake caused by unstable Thresholds!
Where the Backrooms Fits in the Original ARG Timeline
Kane Parsons’ “The Backrooms” horor short
Though the film takes place in 1990, the ARG’s timeline actually begins in 1996, with the original found footage upload and the ensuing research sparked by the video serving as sequels to the A24 production. Not only that, but film’s Still Life monsters (“misremembered” versions of real people who wandered into the rooms) appear to be precursors to the Lifeform from the series.
In the original videos, it’s speculated that the humanoid predator inhabiting the Complex is the result of a novel strain of hay bacillus forming a human-shaped colony, though the addition of the Still Life mythology may very well mean that the mutated hay bacillus itself is a Still Life reproduction of an existing bacteria that somehow fell into the Complex.
The film also offers us an interesting clue into the history of the Foundation when Mark Duplass’ Phil talks about how the company used to work with MRI machines. This seemingly innocuous origin for the secretive organization implies that the Complex itself might be the result of some advanced form of neural imaging – as if the Threshold is somehow opening a portal to the universe’s -or even God’s- subconscious mind.
Who is Naren Warne and Why is He Important to Backrooms Lore?
Async researches in “Backrooms” web series
One of the more direct connections between the film and the series happens to be Avan Jogia’s Naren Warne, an unfortunate Async Institute scientist who shows up in the movie’s found footage prologue. A now-deleted Discord post by Kane Parsons himself suggests that Warne was originally a part of the Missing Persons survey team that discovered a dead body taken over by “mold” (the aforementioned hay bacillus).
At some point during the expedition, Naren appears to have been separated from the rest of the team and wound up wandering alone in the Backrooms. The film opens with the desperate scientist’s VHS footage as he records his attempts to contact his superiors and is ultimately chased down by an unseen Lifeform.
While this prologue mostly serves to establish that the Backrooms contain more than empty hallways, it’s fun to see Parsons include a trail of breadcrumbs leading back to the lo-fi source material even when working on such a high-profile production.
Naturally, there are other curious connections to be found here, such as a faithful recreation of the original photo that spawned the Backrooms creepypasta in the first place, as well as audio cues harkening back to the various TikTok musical trends that often accompany liminal horror content.
However, half the fun of engaging with lore-heavy material comes from discussing theories with fellow fans, so I’d like to invite readers to comment below with your own favorite additions to the lore/references to the ARG! Just be sure to watch out for suspicious-looking furniture salesmen – especially if they’re dressed up like a pirate.
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