THE STORY – Therapist Dr. Mary Kline ventures into an otherworldly dimension in search of her missing patient, Clark.
THE CAST – Renate Reinsve, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett & Lukita Maxwell
THE TEAM – Kane Parsons (Director) & Will Soodik (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 110 Minutes
In the lower level of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire furniture store, there is a place. Or, perhaps more accurately, a memory of a place. When store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) drunkenly stumbles downstairs one evening after a strange power surge, he passes through a wall like a ghost, finding himself in an alternate version of the store stripped of all detail and personality. The walls are all covered in the same pale, faded wallpaper, the furniture is piled up, stuck together, or half sunken into the floor, and it’s eerily quiet and empty. Except, that is, for when a particular presence is close by. Yes, something is living in this endless labyrinth of oddly-shaped, physics-defying spaces. But what does it want? What even is it? And where is this place anyway?
Welcome to the Backrooms. From its humble origins as a 4chan thread about “disquieting images” that “just feel ‘off’,” site users eventually created a whole lore around images of liminal spaces they saw as another dimension, complete with interconnected levels and hostile entities that inhabit them. Visual artist Kane Pixels (née Parsons) created a viral web series based on the concept and, on the strength of that series, became the youngest filmmaker to receive a development deal from A24 to adapt it into a feature-length film. “Backrooms” sees Parsons arrive on the cinematic scene as a fully formed filmmaker, with a strong visual style and a knack for creative, engaging storytelling.
“Backrooms,” the film follows two characters, the aforementioned Clark and his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), as they discover and explore the titular dimension. Clark’s wife left him – rather, she kicked him out of his own house – forcing him to sleep at the store and create increasingly desperate advertisements with a couple of local kids (Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell) in an attempt to drive up business. A frustrated architect, he rages over having to work his ass off selling furniture to support his wife through school, and has taken to drinking to get through. The Backrooms seem almost drawn straight from Clark’s subconscious, offering the perfect outlet for his architectural drafting skills as he explores and maps the space. Before long, Clark has gone missing, having drawn seemingly everyone he knows into the Backrooms. But can Mary, dealing with her own trauma after seeing her childhood home getting torn down, survive there long enough to save Clark from whatever malevolent presence is stalking the realm’s never-ending halls?
Expanding his vision to the big screen, Parsons uses the Backrooms as an allegory, leaving the film open-ended enough for viewers to come away with different interpretations of what it “means.” It’s just as easily readable as a reckoning with the breakdown of societal conventions post-COVID lockdowns, as a commentary on the rise of generative AI, or even as metacommentary about itself and the dangers of becoming too obsessed with something that only exists online. Setting the film during the self-help craze of the ‘90s opens the story to a wider range of interpretations by distancing it from its Internet-era roots. The setting also centers the characters’ psychology, making the film equally a psychological character study and a liminal horror adventure. The film’s pacing reflects this, opting for long, dread-inducing sequences of characters exploring the Backrooms with little happening. As a showcase for Danny Vermette’s brilliant production design and Parsons’s preternatural control over tone and atmosphere, this is incredibly welcome. Still, those who prefer action and character development may struggle. The film’s soundscape, including the score by Parsons and Edo Van Breemen, keeps you perpetually on edge with its nerve-shredding combination of throbbing bass squelches and muted ambient sounds, and there’s some new unsettling image around seemingly every corner, but the bulk of the film is just characters wandering around the Backrooms, without much character development to speak of.
This isn’t necessarily a problem, but the film’s third act is predicated on a character turn that doesn’t fully make sense at first because of the little development it receives throughout. Thankfully, Parsons has Reinsve and Ejiofor playing characters that fit them so perfectly that they don’t need much on-paper development to convey the necessary arcs. Both actors have the ability to draw us into their characters’ chilly interiority, a necessity in a film as austere as this. Despite the occasionally oblique storytelling, the actors communicate so much through their body language and facial expressions that the film’s emotional throughline comes through loud and clear. One can’t help but wish there were a bit more incident to the film’s plot. Still, between the psychologically sharp performances and the mystery that powers the film’s setting, “Backrooms” remains compulsively watchable throughout.
Parsons fills his “Backrooms” with ideas both intellectual and visual, so much so that one might rightfully call it overstuffed. But his tight control over the film’s oppressively foreboding tone means that it never feels that way. On the contrary, “Backrooms” feels as sparse as the backrooms themselves, with long pauses and very slowly moving scenes. This is where the film’s slow pace works in its favor, allowing space for the surfeit of ideas to bounce around your brain while Parsons sets your nerves on edge following the characters through the yellow-wallpapered nightmare realm. While that slow pace means that the film never reaches the thrilling, pulse-pounding heights of most conventional horror films, Parsons builds such a heavy atmosphere of dread that it works on its own terms. There’s a genuine sense of danger at play, as we never know what lies in wait around each corner of the Backrooms, and Parsons exploits that as much as he can. The slow pace and thin characters may test your patience, but whenever we’re in the titular location, “Backrooms” becomes a piece of pure nightmare fuel, all murky shadows and muted sounds that capture the feeling of being alone in an abandoned building with anxiety-inducing accuracy. Parsons could have pushed the surrealistic anarchy of the last act even further, but in staying true to the liminal horror of the post that started it all, he has created a film that is as existentially terrifying as it is viscerally thrilling. The thrills of “Backrooms” may be more intellectual, but getting lost in Parsons’s world is still entertaining. I will happily go wherever he wants to take us next.
