Backrooms started life from a 4Chan post of a low-res photo of an empty furniture store with a simple idea: be careful or you might fall into a crack in reality and end up in the backrooms. A seemingly endless space between spaces which may or may not something else there. Since that fateful post there has no been shortage of memes, lore videos, and video games based off such a basic but filled with endless potential premise. Kane Parsons got his start making short films about the Backrooms which I’ll admit I’m not really familiar with outside the first one he’s done. That first one was impressive however showcasing his talent for creating claustrophobic isolation as well as the uncertainty that you might not be alone. But the Backrooms seems, to me anyways, something that lends itself to the short form format. Something that’s meant to be cryptically vague and atmospheric but to the point so people online can debate amongst themselves about what it means after watching it on their phone. So while I was happy that such a young filmmaker got a massive film deal I was however apprehensive about how the idea of the Backrooms will lend itself to the big screen.
So let me say with great pleasure that even with some stumbles in its final stretch Backrooms might be the most unnerving film I’ve seen this year. It would have been easy to make an easy-to-digest jumpscare-fest for people to post reactions to on TikTok but Parson’s film is a slow burn cerebral horror that plays on your primal fears.
Backrooms, from a script by Will Soodik, takes audiences back to the year of 1990. A better time where men wore crop-tops and couches had abstract brush stroke designs. Selling said couches is our lead Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejifor, a furniture store salesmen whose business seems like a money front due to how empty it is. When not struggling to sell furniture (turns out marketing yourself as a pirate doesn’t lend itself to customers) Clark spends his time drinking, or lamenting his many often self-inflected woes to his therapist Mary, played by Renate Reinsve. Clark is the perfect candidate to discover a liminal hell in his shop because even before stumbling upon it in the subfloor of his store he seems like he’s one screw away breaking loose and his discovery of the titular backrooms paves the way for him to indulge his fragile ego and quickly becomes his obsession.
I always found liminal spaces to be fascinating. It’s mostly because I have a weird interest in how our brains perceive memories. This could be just a me thing but I remember the feelings and emotions when it comes to distant memories and I remember specific snapshots in fine detail but in general it feels like someone rubbed vaseline over them. It’s there but the fine details are just out reach. Liminal spaces play with that feeling of familiar but far away. I think that’s why I found Kane Parson’s Backrooms so effective. Parson uses the rooms as a way to explore the characters memories and how they start to overlap upon themselves. The horror of Backrooms doesn’t come from the unknown itself but how Parson’s manages to make the familiar completely alien.
While not completely a found footage film, like Parsons shorts, there are two extended sequences that utilize the format and these, especially the second, are chilling. The grain and artifacting of the VHS style gives Backrooms an uncomfortable sense of realism and leads to images that I won’t stop thinking about for the near future.
Backrooms is at its best when it acts more like an art installation from hell. Meant to be felt and digested for ourselves to interpret. Where the film stumbles majorly though is whenever it decides to not trust the audience but doesn’t have the confidence to commit to the explanations. I won’t go into spoilers but there are two moments in the final act that attempt to give a meaning to the madness. One feels repetitive because it explains something the audience can already figure out themselves, but the other while not movie ruining for me, feels like such a cop out due to how generic a decision it is but is compounded by the fact that it acts as sequel bait.
Despite these stumbles, Backrooms is a great debut film and unlocks the potential for abstract horror for a wider audience if the box office and my personal completely packed theater is any signal. I recommend checking it out in theaters while you can.
4/5
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