Brenda Zlamany on Backrooms, Cubism, and the Class Politics of Horror

Artist Brenda Zlamany reflects on the 2026 film Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, in a personal essay for Two Coats of Paint. She contrasts the film's non-linear, Cubist-inspired structure with Julian Schnabel's In the Hand of Dante, which she attended shortly after the death of David Hockney. Zlamany, who was Schnabel's etching printer from 1981 to 1985, draws parallels between the film's treatment of time and her own experience of grief and memory. She critiques the film's ending for introducing a control room and researcher Phil from Async, which she sees as a concession to viewers unable to sit with uncertainty. Zlamany also examines the class dimensions of the horror: the film codes working-class spaces like church basements and cheap furniture stores as dreadful, whereas for her, those rooms were formative. She notes the generational gap between herself and her daughter Oona, who saw the film differently. The essay praises the character Mary, who fights the monster with a piece of cement from her demolished childhood home, embodying a Cubist multiplicity. Zlamany concludes that the film's true horror is self-recognition, not external monsters.