A furniture warehouse filled with oddly arranged rooms, clipped-looking chairs, low ceilings, exposed pipes, and seemingly endless corridors provides the clearest demonstration of what the group is actually searching for. Rather than simply labeling any empty building “liminal,” the participants respond to architectural details that make an ordinary space feel subtly wrong: transitions that seem to lead nowhere, familiar layouts stripped of their usual purpose, and environments that resemble something remembered more than something consciously recognized. When the locations naturally produce that effect, the photography challenge becomes surprisingly compelling.
The strongest sequences come from places that were not deliberately constructed around the Backrooms aesthetic. The furniture store in particular inspires genuine excitement because its strange floor plan already resembles the manufactured spaces associated with that style. A deserted playground surrounded by darkness and fog achieves a different effect, using vibrant childhood imagery against an almost featureless background. The empty carnival works for similar reasons: operating machines, lights, fog, and the conspicuous absence of people turn a place normally defined by crowds into something unsettling. These moments communicate the idea of liminality much better than repeated declarations that something looks “liminal.”
Photography gives the trip a useful objective beyond simply touring unusual locations. The stated goal is to create images that appear familiar while remaining difficult to place, and several discussions demonstrate how framing contributes to that feeling. Corners, hallways, exit signs, security cameras, transitional spaces, anonymous utility areas, and objects partially removed from context are deliberately favored over obvious attractions. The participants also experiment with human figures, unusual angles, darkness, and visual emptiness, making the project feel like an active search for an aesthetic rather than a passive sightseeing montage.
Not every destination fits the concept equally well. A recreation of Backrooms environments produces striking imagery, but because the set was specifically designed to create those sensations, discovering liminality there feels less surprising than finding it organically in a store, hotel, playground, road, or carnival. The museum similarly announces itself as a place deliberately built around unusual environments. Meanwhile, the Utah salt flats and isolated road broaden “liminal” until it sometimes seems to mean little more than empty, surreal, or remote. The participants themselves offer the more useful definition of transitional space, but the term is applied inconsistently throughout the journey.
The Stanley Hotel section illustrates another recurring weakness: atmospheric concepts frequently become entangled with supernatural joking. The hotel is introduced as supposedly highly haunted, one participant states a belief in ghosts, and a black light is jokingly treated as a way to detect paranormal material. Nothing presented establishes that ghosts or “ectoplasm” are actually present, and the sequence functions far better as comedy and aesthetic exploration than paranormal evidence. Likewise, speculation that specific locations inspired the Backrooms movie is repeatedly framed as a possibility rather than demonstrated through evidence.
Humor dominates nearly every stop, producing an energetic group dynamic but also repeatedly overwhelming the photography itself. Improvised character bits, sexual jokes, running gags, mock arguments, monster-energy references, fossilized-underwear jokes, and deliberately absurd explanations keep the pace lively, yet the constant interruptions occasionally make the underlying visual idea difficult to appreciate. The strongest stretches allow a strange location to breathe long enough for its atmosphere to register. More lingering attention to the resulting photographs—and less repetition of how unbelievably “liminal” each new place supposedly is—would have made the central creative experiment considerably stronger.
The ending also stops short of delivering the payoff established at the beginning. Ten photographs are selected and sent to Kane Parsons to choose the most liminal image, but his response and final selection are not included. Instead, viewers are directed toward voting, subscribing, tagging Parsons, and potentially enabling another installment. That makes the journey entertaining on its own terms, but it leaves the promised judging component unresolved just when the photography competition should reach its conclusion.
Pros
- Finds genuinely evocative environments, especially the sprawling furniture store, foggy playground, and deserted carnival.
- Gives the location-hopping structure a clear creative purpose by challenging the group to photograph familiar spaces in unfamiliar ways.
- Offers useful observations about framing, transitional architecture, emptiness, and contextual ambiguity that help explain why certain images feel liminal.
- Energetic chemistry and spontaneous reactions make the exploration consistently entertaining.
Cons
- Applies “liminal” so broadly that empty, creepy, nostalgic, surreal, transitional, and remote sometimes become interchangeable concepts.
- Constant jokes and repeated declarations about how liminal each location looks occasionally overpower the photography and atmosphere.
- Paranormal material surrounding the Stanley Hotel is played for comedy without providing evidence for supernatural claims.
- The promised selection by Kane Parsons is not shown, leaving the central photo competition without a proper conclusion.
The search works best when ordinary architecture unexpectedly resembles a half-remembered dream, turning furniture aisles, playgrounds, and abandoned entertainment spaces into genuinely eerie photographic subjects. Strong locations and enthusiastic experimentation compensate for an overextended definition of liminality and humor that sometimes crowds out the atmosphere. The unresolved judging prevents the concept from landing as cleanly as it could, but the journey still delivers an entertaining exploration of why familiar places can suddenly feel profoundly strange.
