Disclosure Day & Backrooms

Monday, September 14, 2026

Intro

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MARIE WESTHAVER:

Hello, and welcome to At The Movies with Mike and Marie, a show where two film professors talk about movies. I'm Marie Westhaver.

MIKE GIULIANO:

And I'm Mike Giuliano.

MARIE WESTHAVER:

And today we're going to talk about Disclosure Day and Backrooms, starting with Steven Spielberg's newest movie, Disclosure Day, which the marketing, anyway, leaned on a single question. If you found out we weren't alone, would that frighten you? So with that, Mike set us up for this discussion.

Disclosure Day

MIKE GIULIANO:

All right. So let's talk about Steven Spielberg a bit because he's, what, 79 now at this point in his career. And what a career it's been. One of his career-long interests, of course, has been alien life forms. And take it all the way back to early in the career, Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, ET in 1982.

Now, mostly these have been friendly aliens. And not surprising for Spielberg. You can find warm and gushy moments with human life forms and with alien life forms, but not always. Remind yourselves also, of course, of War of the Worlds, his version from 2005, where the aliens were not quite as friendly. And so he's had just a keen interest.

And for him by now, that's a given. He has such a strong interest and, essentially, belief in this, and wants to share that with us. And I think that's something that, for anyone who's tracked his career, you can see how this film, Disclosure Day, fully follows through on that. But it follows through on some career-long interests and filmmaking tactics in Spielberg's career.

I mean, for instance, in some ways the film is also a throwback to paranoid thrillers of the '60s and early '70s, conspiracy theories and government or other agencies trying to keep things under wraps and so on, and our protagonist up against that system and so on. And Spielberg would have known all that from when he was an up-and-coming filmmaker. And his films, to some extent, have picked up on that through the years as well.

And that's actually a very strong thematic thread in this film. And then even in terms when I mentioned filmmaking tactics-- and, of course, Spielberg, whatever you think of some of the films, in terms of personal favorites, they're exceptionally well-crafted. I mean, he's such a consummate filmmaker at that level. And in many ways, this film has so many chase sequences in it-- car chases, train chases, you name it chases-- that I was reminded of Spielberg's very first film, Duel.

There are places in this film, like 10 or 15 minutes of the clip, where one car is chasing another, or cars up against a train or something. And he's just having fun at that level of actually, quite technically, how you would shoot and edit a sequence like that. And he's really, really good at it. I got to say, though, we'll get more into the specifics of it here.

For me, it was not entirely a letdown, but didn't fully realize its potential, I would say on two scores. One score is this film really does jump all over the place-- a lot of parallel editing there. What's going on in the Midwest? What's going on in Washington, DC? What's going on here and there?

But where I think the film loses its grip a bit is that sometimes it seems like somebody gets in a car here, and just like 10 minutes later, they're on the other side of the country. And having driven through most of the Midwest, I know it takes a little bit longer than that. And believe me, I don't want it in real time, please. But I want a stronger sense of just what's involved because that really is-- all joking aside, that's really a serious point.

So that, for me was a bit of a letdown. A second-- and we'll talk more about particular characters here. But sometimes, thematically, it gets a bit heavy-handed and ponderous. There's even like a nun at what's listed as a monastery and some rather ponderous speeches here about the nature of humanity and the spiritual life and so on. And it really leans on that material.

Although I said I only had two reservations, I had a third, which is that, for me, emotionally, it never quite landed with full force. And it was at a more abstruse level in some ways, in terms of philosophical concerns. And that's fine. But at the gut level, that really human level, I didn't care deeply enough about some of the characters and their interactions. I was always engaged, but I never felt like, get out the handkerchief, or this or that.

So because my handkerchief is still in the pocket, let me just turn it over to you at this point. Was your hankie in the purse or exposed?

MARIE WESTHAVER:

I did not need my hankie for any of the scenes. First of all, I'm surprised you didn't bring it up. The runtime was way too long. And if I was doing the editing, I would have cut out some of the characters altogether. For example, Emily Blunt's boyfriend in this movie, I felt like they put in there with these scenes that were meant to be funny but weren't funny.

Could have done without him altogether. I didn't think he advanced the plot at all. And she's supposed to be the successful meteorologist. And I just don't even understand what she was doing with him. The second was Josh O'Connor's girlfriend. It was a little confusing to me to have to follow two couples trying to figure out who's supposed to be the hero and who you're actually supposed to be following. I mean, obviously, Emily Blunt is the star. And I thought she did a great job.

I was confused also by Josh O'Connor's girlfriend's character because for most of the movie I kept thinking, is that Rachel Weiss? That can't be Rachel Weiss. And it wasn't. But I felt that very-- just a disorienting sense of not being able to track a character. I don't know. It just didn't gel, in terms of the characterizations. And I wanted more aliens, too. Less people, more aliens.

MIKE GIULIANO:

They were much more interesting characters. Now, but again, joking aside, I thought we did get some glimpses of aliens. But if you're really going to get into it, I wanted more of that. They were more interesting than some of the people. But I understand what you're saying.

I always complain about movies being too long. And I know it's 145 minutes. I actually didn't feel it as being long, and just simply because it was so busy, because there was always something percolating. You know what I mean? I never felt like it was really dragging. I wasn't exactly edge of the seat engaged, but I was always with it. So for me, actually, that was not an issue so much.

So anyway, we've jumped on to some of the characters. Let's do the expository groundwork. Josh O'Connor plays a guy named Daniel Kellner who has stolen files from a private cybersecurity firm. So this is where the paranoid thriller comes into it because this is the company that has the down and dirty about aliens and this and that. And they're keeping it under wraps, and whatever collusion with the government or elsewhere.

And he wants to get the word out there. So he's going to be on the run from his former company and from all sorts of other people. And then concurrently-- and this is why I understand your confusion here because, first of all, you have the principal character. Sometimes their significant others are traced in or limned rather thinly. You're right. You don't have a firm enough sense of them. And do we even need some of them?

But anyway, just as he's now hyperactive with all this, there's somebody that he doesn't initially know-- Margaret Fairchild, played by Emily Blunt, who, you're right, gives a really good performance. She plays a Kansas City broadcaster, specifically the weather girls they used to say. She gives weather reports. And actually, some of the most amusing and also disturbing scenes are when, for reasons she can't explain, she starts babbling.

It's like Tower of Babel, numerical data and weird words pouring out. And she's on the air. What's happening here? Is there some sort of alien interference? And those scenes are really quite compelling, partly because her performance is so strong. Imagine you're on stage, and the camera's on, and you're just supposed to give a normal weather report. And suddenly, you start channeling all this stuff.

So anyway, the two of them are going to eventually connect. And I don't want to spoil some of the plot complications. But you're absolutely right. For her character, Margaret's character has a boyfriend, Jackson, played by Wyatt Russell. And it's such a thinly-limned character, so thinly written, that I think you're right. I think he could actually dispense with some of that.

It seems to me this is like the de rigueur-- well, you need a significant love interest, right? You got to have a boyfriend and girlfriend. And yet they don't do much with it. And sometimes those secondary characters drop out for long stretches. And I understand the confusion. When they pop up again-- oh, yeah, right, that's the boyfriend. Where's he been all this time?

And now where also, I think, it goes on a sidetrack that is regrettable, for me at least, is Daniel also has a significant other, his girlfriend Jane, played by Eve Hewson. She's a former nun. And that was my earlier reference, that there's going to be a scene of going back to the nunnery, if you will. You then had them taking shelter there.

And then when-- I'll call her the head nun. When she starts making this really ponderous speech, it's so heavy-handed. It's just like, I would accept it more in an Exorcist type movie, where it's like, well, you know that-- and then it's thundering music at that point. It's that kind of speech.

And the movie otherwise, it's not that it's ever subtle necessarily, but it's not quite on the nose as that sometimes. And those are scenes where you feel like there's a polemic being delivered. You know what I mean? Like somebody is getting a message across to you.

And as these characters get to meet each other and interact, and they're all on the run on the road, at some point, the mysterious company has as its leader, Colin Firth. He's very, very effective and very scary, actually. And there I don't really need too much character development because he's really presented as a stage heavy.

And I'm fine with that. I don't need to know his backstory. Was he dropped on his head as a child or anything? I don't need to know. I don't need to know any of that. He's the bad guy here. And he's very good at playing a bad guy.

So for me, once that gets set in motion, it held my interest for 145 minutes. But I do agree very strongly with you that, when we do get glimpses of alien life forms, that footage is really well shot, really well edited, really well put together, quite effective. And I just wanted to know more at that point. I did want to know more about their backstories, in terms of where the aliens came from. And supposedly they're friendly and non-threatening and so on.

But that's, in some ways, because we've seen humanity at its worst in some cases. And the aliens just happen to-- like they're on vacation or something, happen to be here. And they're taken prisoners and kept confined and whatever. That's a really interesting storyline as to how they would have been found and kept and so on. What if we had scuttled some of those secondary romantic interests and then really engaged with the aliens themselves? If that's our full disclosure, let's have it.

MARIE WESTHAVER:

Yeah, I felt like we really didn't get disclosure. What we got is the first glimpses of something very few people knew about.

MIKE GIULIANO:

But the thematic message, ultimately, through the sense that the truth is not proprietary. It should not be controlled by the government or by the secretive company. Think about big corporations. But that it belongs to eight billion people. And I totally accept that as a message. But if this is the truth, I want to know more about the truth. I mean, if aliens have moved in next door, I'd like to meet them.

MARIE WESTHAVER:

Yes, more aliens. That's what he should have done differently. Now, it was Spielberg. So of course, top-notch people working with him. The John Williams music was good. But I think, in the end, I feel like it sort of-- I know a lot of people were really excited about it, looking forward to it.

I think a lot of people always look forward to movies about, what if there's extraterrestrials who are amongst us, kind of thing. And I liked the ending line of, listen. Reminded me of one of my favorite movies, The Prestige, where it starts and ends with, are you watching closely?

MIKE GIULIANO:

Yeah, yeah. Now, it's interesting when you mentioned John Williams. I mean, that's such a strong career-long collaborator. But the Williams score doesn't really kick in for a while in this film. And when it does, its sort of fitfully. And I have a lot of admiration for John Williams.

I'm not going to say he's coasting here, but it's almost more like incidental music that comes in periodically. It's not a true score, really. And he's in his early '90s. Cut him some slack. He's still writing good music. So again, with all due respect there, I didn't feel it was deployed as often or as effectively as it might have been.

But when it registers, it really does. I mean, he's such a gifted composer. And in career terms, it is sweet to have him still working with Steven Spielberg.

MARIE WESTHAVER:

Well, I would call this a plane movie, the kind of movie that you watch on a plane. It's got enough going on that it'll hold your interest. But in a lot of ways, I think a missed opportunity. What's your final word?

MIKE GIULIANO:

I don't know. You make it almost sound like a Twilight Zone thing. But you're looking out the window of the airplane, and there's something or someone on the wing. It's a Twilight Zone kind of-- but to bolster your comment there, the film opened reasonably well.

And it's done OK. But I emphasize OK. It's not like a big blockbuster. So we've had other films out recently that have made a lot more money and a bigger splash. So I think that's really underscoring your essential point there, is that a lot of people are not completely disappointed with Disclosure Day, but the word of mouth would not exactly be explosive here. It's more a matter of, on balance, it's worth seeing. But it's not like telling your friends, you got to go see this.

Backrooms

MARIE WESTHAVER:

Exactly, which it's a great segue into Backrooms. And interestingly, you were right about Colin Firth in Disclosure Day. He usually doesn't play the bad guy though. So he's playing against type. And so is Chiwetel Ejiofor in this movie, which is one of the reasons I went to see it, because I think he's a good actor.

And I knew this was kind of like a small movie drawn in, of course, by the fact that it's an A24 movie. They always seem to do interesting things. But this one's a weird one. How do you want to set us up for Backrooms, Mike?

MIKE GIULIANO:

Well, let's talk about it as a phenomenon. It's interesting that, at the same time, late spring and early summer, we had two films released, Obsession and Backrooms, which are low-budget horror films. Now, what's interesting within the genre is-- I go to see all these films, which probably explains a lot. But I watch all these.

So often with horror films nowadays, you get the franchise sequels, right? And by now, I know all my Roman numbers, right? The numerals add up. There's a lack of originality in a lot of these. They just hit the reset button. These films are different. Obsession and Backrooms are low-budget, and they are original indie horror films from young directors.

Both of these films-- although we're not talking about Obsession by way of review today, by way of context, Obsession was fascinating because it opened much more strongly than they expected. And it actually did even better the second and third weeks. That almost never happens with a film, that it builds box office. That's like an old fashioned, word of mouth, box office builds. Almost always now, films, even if they open big, they drop pretty quickly, right? Obsession built like that.

Backrooms also did better than expected. You have to realize these are films that, if they only cost like a million dollars, give or take, they've made back their budget and then some, well into the hundreds of millions. So this really has been a phenomenon. And in terms of these young directors, let's call it the YouTube generation because the director of Backrooms, Kane Parsons, is only like 20.

And it began as a web series. And it played off of the found footage sensibility, which he would have known growing up from Blair Witch Project, the POV, jittery camera work and so on. I know that was all overused after Blair Witch, but it can still work really well in the right context.

Now, what works extremely well here is the basic premise. Chiwetel Ejiofor, who is a really good actor, he plays just this average guy, furniture salesman, kind set around 1990s, sort of a suburban office park, blandness to the store itself. And a kind of familiarity there, which is meant to be-- I don't want to say boring, but just simply very familiar to us.

And I love the name of the store where he's the furniture salesman. It's Captain Clark's Ottoman Empire. And there are TV commercials with it and so on. And the premise is really nifty because it's such a familiar place for him, certainly. And this is a fantasy many of us have had. And I've even had it walking through my own house or walking through certain buildings. What if there were a secret room? It's just, whether you're having a dream or just whimsically as you walk through the house, what if there were a passageway there or another door?

And not to spoil anything here, but essentially, yes, there is an almost like Alice in Wonderland quality of, what if you could go through the wall and there's this hidden space? What's really neat there is, you get down into the basement, and you find there is a secret room. But you know what? It's a series of rooms, and a seemingly endless series of rooms. And you can get trapped in there.

When you re-emerge, how do you convince your colleagues and friends and all what you've just gone through? So that's a really nifty idea. And evidently, I hadn't watched the web series, but from reading about it, evidently, that would have worked really well with the web series because these would be like short, what I call squib filmmaking, short, short takes, this or that. You're in the room, this and that. What do you find? And so on. And then however many minutes later, that's the end of the little film.

So here's where I have mixed feelings about Backrooms. I think it's really a fascinating premise. And I think it's well-cast. And as you say, with the principal actor. And it's very effectively shot. That nifty premise, I think, wears thin at feature length.

The film is 110 minutes long, and that's much longer than it really merits because after a while, there is a kind of redundancy factor. Some of the later rooms aren't quite as interesting or whatever. But in any event, it's a sort of replaying the same basic situation. And you don't really get a much deeper understanding of character, or what in the world is going on here, or in supernatural terms, what's going on.

You don't really get additional material that's meaningful in any sense. It's just more of the same. After I was sitting there for about an hour or so, I really felt like it sort of had it.

And again, I never lost interest in the film. But it never somehow went to whatever that next step might be. And I think that can happen with films like this, when they're based on a YouTube video or a web series of some sort. It's like, yeah, we got a great idea, and let's do it. Well, OK. But what works at 10 minutes might not work at 110 minutes quite as well. What do you think?

MARIE WESTHAVER:

I think you nailed it because I was trying to figure out how to say that very thing. I love the idea of a secret room. That's such a great premise for a story. And I'm thinking about Narnia, where you go to the back of the closet. And suddenly, it's not a back of a closet anymore. You can feel snow. And it's a whole magical place that you can't help but go investigate.

What makes this different is, if I saw that there was a secret way to walk through the wall and end up in a different place, man, I would bring a flashlight. I mean, he does this practically in the dark. I just felt like once he got through there and saw how bizarre everything was, I don't know that I would go back. But when he finally does bring the people he works with in there to film it, prove that it's true, it's clear he's been there several times.

They don't show him going in several times, but enough times that he's able to start mapping out the lay of the land there. I mean, I kind of got the impression, since he's in therapy for his marriage breaking up, that part of the idea of the Backrooms is continually going back to dwell in spaces that really aren't pleasant to experience. And yet, you simply can't help yourself. If you think of it as a metaphor for memory or old things you can't quite get past, I thought it worked really well.

The creepiness of the openness of the rooms and the way they were shot, really well done. But it does wear thin because you want it to keep escalating. And the way that it does I didn't find particularly satisfying. But I also did think-- this is something popular recently-- it reminded me of the movie Exit 8, where a guy is trapped in this endless subway and can't get out. Haven't we all had that dream?

MIKE GIULIANO:

Yeah. In fact, thank you for mentioning that because by the second half of the film, I was thinking of similar films. And Exit 8, which I had just seen a few weeks before, came to mind there. What If you get trapped in a corridor or endless series? And we've all been lost in subway stations. Do I go left or right? And every quarter sort of looks the same. And you find yourself circling like that.

But particularly for guys, you would never ask directions, right? So you just keep going around in circles. So it tapped into memories like that for me. And Exit 8, that also wore thin for me after a while. But it was a really nifty premise. And I just think, at feature length, it's hard to sustain that, unless you have something else.

Also here, I got to say, should one have logical objections or reservations to a film like this, what would you do in that situation? Well, I guess I'm an overly cautious citizen. But if I were that furniture salesman, that's my store, which I thought I knew well, and then suddenly I find out there's this secret room down in the basement, well, you're right. Would I want to go back?

I mean, maybe the first time in. Like, what's this? But would I want to go back to it? But I think the first time I went in, if I was lucky enough to emerge, I would have made two calls. The first would be I would call the landlord like, have you been in the basement lately? Do you know what's down there?

And I think I might also even-- I know this is really such a goody two shoes thing. I might even call the police. You got to come and check this out. But in movies like this, characters almost never do things.

But I agree strongly with you. Once he gets inside, particularly the first room and series of rooms, it has a sort of-- I call it a Stanley Kubrick quality of, you're in a vacant room just with white walls, a few pieces of furniture. What's around the bend? And the near silence of that. So every little incident, every little noise, everything sort of creeps you out because you're not sure where you are, what's going on.

MARIE WESTHAVER:

But there's also the deliberate immersion in the horror because like I said with Narnia, yeah, there were some dangers when you got there, but mostly it was this magical place with these-- you were drawn to it because there was a sense of wonder. Here, it isn't wonder that's bringing you through that wall. It's dread.

MIKE GIULIANO:

Well, dread. And that's a good point to make, is that this is a film that establishes a really creepy, ominous atmosphere. But I don't think many movies can sustain that feature length.

MARIE WESTHAVER:

Well, I would say that this is a movie that you should see because everybody's talking about it.

MIKE GIULIANO:

Well, you're absolutely right. Again, both Obsession and Backrooms, small films, limited budgets, favorable reviews. But it truly was the word of mouth, or word of social media, that really made both films hold on. And not many films have legs like that now, where they hold on week by week. But as you and I are talking today, both these films are still playing and have been playing for a long time.

That's unusual. And I think that's terrific, actually. It's an alternative to the big blockbuster mentality. These are really small films that have captured people's fancy. Obsession and Backrooms, people are talking about these films. We're not the only two people talking about them.

MARIE WESTHAVER:

Also, if we're talking about directors who are 20 years old, they're just going to keep getting better. And you're going to see more from them.

MIKE GIULIANO:

Well, I hope so. But you know what? I don't want sequels to these. I don't want Backrooms 2. Guess what? There's a subbasement as well. And that's the real worry, is that the corporate heads, they track box office. And they're going to want these guys to do the same thing, right? Like, return to it.

And I hope they resist that urge. If you can make original content, make original content. Don't just crank out sequels. So that's my final word of advice.

MARIE WESTHAVER:

All right. And we'll end on that note. That's the end of this episode. But don't forget to check out our others at ATMHCC at podbean.com. And we'll see you next time at the movies.

MIKE GIULIANO:

See you then.

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Outro

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Podcast Producer:

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Disclosure Day & Backrooms