I liked it. After glancing through various wikipedia pages, I concluded that the movie was about liminal spaces, in-between spaces, not-quite-there-yet spaces, but it’s also about liminal people. The MC is a divorced alcoholic failing small business owner wannabe architect who has no friends or family, only a couple of employees and a therapist, whose only relationships are money relationships—not a full person. The therapist is traumatized from growing up in a backrooms-like environment with her mentally sick mother who eventually got committed, and has found some success in her writing but still feels empty (running away from her own book launch party to pop some kind of pill), and is likewise unable to help or cure her client, who can barely bother to show up to their sessions on time. Her childhood home, all that’s seemingly left of her mother, was destroyed in order to make room for an office building. These are liminal people.

Even outside the backrooms, the environments we see are fairly dead, and hardly better than their backrooms equivalents: the outside of a huge (yet mostly empty) shopping center (which is about pirates but also an ottoman empire, an orientalist mishmash that makes little sense in its own liminal way), a few subdivisions where no one seems to be around, plus what seemed like a hotel converted into low-income housing? The whole world here is liminal. Even the employees are forced to suspend whatever they were doing in their home (fucking, producing offspring, the only thing the proletariat is good for according to the etymology of the term?) to literally kill themselves for a wage in the backrooms. Theseus here is “the hot guy” with the “End Apartheid” shirt, come to free the slaves trapped in the labyrinth, but because he’s no longer a prince, but a wage earner, Ariadne and Daedalus (with his ball of string / rope) can’t help him.

It was pretty obvious to connect this to the labyrinth, with the minotaur likewise being an incomplete liminal person, with the body of a man and the head of a bull, a petite bourgeois with his feet among the proletariat while his head is in the clouds with haute bourgeois billionaires.

Someone also needs to say something about the racial dynamics in the film. The main character is a black petite bourgeois. No one in the film says a word about him being black. The film could have been made with a white actor in his place, and the script could have been the same. Why did the filmmakers choose to make the main character black (especially in our current anti-woke reaction period) and why then did the film seemingly say nothing about race, aside from seemingly being against apartheid? The white male worker has better politics than the black male petite bourgeois…

The movie made me think of The Shining, Cube, Being John Malkovich, Us, Get Out, and others. All of these movies are kind of riffing on these themes.

As a critique of capitalism, the film shows something terrifying to the proletariat: a small business owner on the rampage inside endless inescapable office space that has been created for profit, not use. These kinds of empty office spaces are frightening because no one is there, only our unconscious bourgeois shadow people can fill them, but beautiful natural environments were devastated to build them, communities were bulldozed for them, and workers went there to kill their dreams in exchange for a wage (before losing their jobs to automation, offshoring, stock market collapses, etc.). They’re the latest iteration of the enclosure of the commons: instead of replacing people with sheep for profit, we’re replacing people with office space for profit, especially on the cusp of the nineties dotcom boom. The film is likewise set in San Jose / Silicon Valley, but could have been set almost anywhere. It’s also not coincidental that this creepypasta became popular at the beginning of the pandemic, when returning to the office (to be terrorized by middle manager half-people) could literally mean losing your life.