For this summer's indie hits, intergenerational anxiety lives in endless spaces

Like It Ends, Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8 also uses a horrific, endless space to explore the suffocating uncertainty of young adulthood. This time, a hallway in a subway station becomes the place a Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya) can’t escape. It’s a setting that, like the natural world surrounding the Jeep in It Ends, invites people to drop their guard and become complacent; because it’s so banal, nothing about these spaces stands out until it’s too late. The Lost Man falls into this new rule-heavy loop after receiving a phone call from his girlfriend telling him that she’s pregnant, unleashing his stresses over impending fatherhood. 

The news throws him into a panic-stricken tailspin, which manifests physically once he realizes he can’t escape the repetitive tunnel. Like many young parents, The Lost Man feels unprepared for this new chapter. Unlike many young parents, this worry sends him to a purgatory where he’s forced to pay close attention to the details around him he used to ignore. When a small child also appears in the hall, his fears around fatherhood only become more physical.

Both It Ends and Exit 8 share foreboding DNA with the biggest hit of the bunch: Kane Parsons’ Backrooms. Set in the ominous spaces behind a permeable wall in the basement of a furniture store, Backrooms sees the business’ struggling owner, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), slowly consumed by the mystery of the space and its secrets, eventually succumbing to the monster inside. The space defies logic, and the more Clark tries to make sense of it, the more he loses touch with reality.

The nearest to a midlife crisis of the bunch, Clark is plagued by economic and personal woes, like his divorce and losing his home, which have sent him into a spiral. The furniture store is a repository for all the hard work and effort he’s put into his job, but all that’s left is a hollow shell. He’s isolated, not just by a lack of customers in the space, but from any human connection—or really, any connection to reality. In exploring the Backrooms, Clark finds a world that makes even less sense than the one crumbling around him on the other side of the wall, and that appeals to him to the point of obsession. Clark has so broken from the real world that he readily accepts the uncanny copies he finds in this unreality—even if his illusions of escapism come with a monstrous price.

The fear of liminal spaces may have its roots in the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic—where footage of empty buildings and streets left uncanny impressions of abandonment upon all who lived through it—but these images have persisted as effective embodiments of the ways life has changed since. The price of basic goods and housing have skyrocketed thanks in part to aimless wars, healthcare has gotten more expensive as subsidies expired, and student loans are back to keeping everyone awake at night. Many young adults are moving back in with their parents, looping back into their childhood bedrooms because striking out on their own is no longer realistic. As life’s milestones have shifted, these generations learn to navigate new passages that might look unending—it’s no wonder the movies trying to scare them do the same.