Backrooms movie review: Little comes closer to the approximation of a full empty life than perhaps a furniture store. Dining tables to be had family meals on, sofas to sink into, almirahs to hold possessions, beds to be slept in – all waiting for someone to take them home.
Little comes closer to the approximation of an empty full life than perhaps an impersonal glass-and-concrete office space. Rows upon rows of people sitting behind screens doing identical work day after day – all waiting for somehow to make it home.
In the Backrooms, the twain meet in the liminal space that the Internet calls it own, where real and fake symbiotically live off each other. It is fitting then that the film should be the creation of 20-year-old YouTube find Kane Parsons, and be steered into massive commercial success by A24, a studio with a nose for zeitgeist and the pocket for zillions.
So, Backrooms started out as a 4Chan idea, a theme board inviting users to post images of things or places that just seemed “off”. Parsons – and others – went on to make short horror films centred specifically in vast empty spaces, which could be anything and everything.
In Parsons’s feature film-length expansion on that, backrooms are explained as “every place that has ever been”.
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Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a disgruntled furniture store owner, finds himself caught in one of them, sometime in 1990, when floppy disks and audio cassette tapes were a thing. Clark has a lot of rage in him, about the architect he wanted to be and couldn’t, about the ex-wife who he felt sucked him dry pursuing her own dreams of being a lawyer, about even the ridiculous promotional videos he is making dressed as a one-leg pirate with a fake parrot on his shoulder to attract customers to his ‘Capt Clark’s Ottoman Empire’ store. Nowhere is this seething frustration more evident than when he topples over trying to hobble on the wooden appendage he has tied to his own good leg, while being filmed for the video by two cynical teenagers.
Ejiofor is scary and pitiful at the same time, lending the terror and tragedy that fill out Backrooms.
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Mary (Renate Reinsve), in comparison, is the meticulously groomed, supernaturally contained therapist of Clark. If she has any other clients, we don’t see them. What we do see is her as alone as Clark when home, watching TV in a dark room. Often, she too is watching her own ads, promoting her self-help book where the subconscious is rendered in the language of walls, windows, and loops that we are all caught in.
Well, that is not subtle at all given the theme of the film. Nor is Mary’s backstory, of a disturbed childhood with a mentally disturbed mother, who boarded up their home afraid of “something out there”.
Clark is the first to go through a wall, literally, and find himself in a parallel space of endless rooms, corridors, doors, cables, whisperings, and standees of one particular man with a device attached that delivers in different languages “a message from the people of the Earth”.
With zero customers, Clark fills his time making Antilla (Ambani-like) architectural drawings. Is he manifesting the backrooms then? Though he does manage to bring back a stool from there, and leave inside two employees.
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Or Mary, for that matter? Are the backrooms a representation of what she remembers of her childhood, the neglect of a littered home where nothing is how it should be, the paranoia of a mother in the furniture stacked against the door?
Or are the backrooms a combination of Clark and Mary’s interactions, one’s memories filling out the other’s inner world, in a way that can never be an exact copy but carry small bits of distortions? Like those people with multiple eyes or melting faces the two encounter when caught in the backrooms?
This certainly innovative horror of Parson’s imagination works best when it leaves us to try and put two and two together, scrap it, and try all over again. What gives Backrooms its punch is the sense of the inexplicable and yet the familiar – we have all been here, walking into a long, dark corridor with lights humming overhead or flickering, a shadow in a corner, the vast stretches of sudden emptying out an unnerving possibility after Covid.
It’s when Parsons (also co-writer) tries to give Backrooms a worldly – even “scientific” – explanation that the film fumbles.
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The other horror creation by a young YouTuber that is also having its moment in Hollywood, Obsession, just had its release. It took a different route, straighter in its plotting, subtle in its messaging.
Says Clark to Mary about the backrooms: “It’s like describing a dog to someone who has never seen one and asking them to draw it… It will never come out the same.”
It doesn’t.
Backrooms movie director: Kane Parsons
Backrooms movie cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Lukita Maxwell, Finn Bennett
Backrooms movie star rating: 3 stars
