"Backrooms" review — Internet ghost story is prime material for disquieting horror
“It’s beautiful, am I right?”
Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, the filmmaker’s debut feature, is inextricably tied to its origins as a 4chan post, in which a photo of a cleared-out retailer in Wisconsin was repackaged as an extradimensional piece of “no-clipped” reality. And now, this anonymous post combining an old photo with two sentences of flavour text has led to a number one box office. While discussing the origins of Backrooms, one also learns that director Parsons is only twenty years old. After his high school filmmaking project went viral on YouTube, a series of found-footage shorts about scientists and their explorations into the “backrooms,” the then-grade twelve student was offered a gig by A24 to produce a feature film expanding on the series. The film is a byproduct of the Gen Z internet virality, both in anonymous posting and the power of YouTube audiences. But let’s get the metatextuality out of the way. So what? So what that the film is based on an internet post? So what that Parsons is only twenty years old? Is the film itself any good? Do internet ghost stories translate well to the big screen? Thankfully, to complement all the noisy background around the film's production, Backrooms, as packaged in this 110-minute interpretation of the concept, is a terrifying exercise in liminal horror and an extremely competent debut.
The core concept of “the backrooms” — as a public-domain entity that has already had many different interpretations across a mountain of internet lore — is remarkably simple. If you take just the wrong step in just the wrong place, you’ll stumble out of reality and into the hundreds of millions of miles of empty, yellow-wallpapered hallways waiting for you to lose yourself in. These are “the backrooms” or reality. In this film, Clark, a down-on-his-luck businessman, is one such person who happens to find one of the cracks between the regular world and this “other place,” a never-ending web of “remembered” rooms pulled from every time and place in human history, taking the form of an irrationally constructed office floor. He remarks to one of the film’s supporting characters that there’s “even a pool” somewhere in the maze. It’s a highly effective concept for horror storytelling, combining the primal fears of the unknown with claustrophobia and the mind-breaking spirals of infinity. These feelings are exactly what Parsons taps into with Backrooms. Mustering up a deep sense of foreboding and dread, the internet’s favourite yellow walls are given a terrifying lease on life, or whatever the backrooms equivalent is, through this film.
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| Photo via A24. |
Set in 1990, Clark (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) finds one of these rifts in spacetime in the basement of his furniture store, a business venture that is rapidly driving him bankrupt. The discovery of this “other place” begins to impact his sessions with his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), before his desperate attempts to research pull his two employees, Cat (Lukita Maxwell) and Bobby (Finn Bennett), beyond the wall. So much of the film’s draw (and the appeal of the original internet folk tale) comes from the visual aesthetic of the backrooms themselves, an empty, sprawling labyrinth of repeated textures and half-conjured elements of reality. The film is an exercise in “liminal horror,” a spin-off from the internet fascination with “liminal spaces,” these often environments that are abandoned or devoid of human presence. Memory plays an important role in the story, as Clark observes that the backrooms seem to be collecting memories of the real world (objects, places, people) and the more it remembers them, the less they function. The memory of this unexplainable alternative space eventually eliminates order, form, purpose, or logic. What starts from just the oppressive hum of a fluorescent bulb slowly escalates to monstrous forms rearing their heads into the depths of the maze, the minotaur to Theseusian metaphor.
Parson’s work on Backrooms is incredible, a stunning piece of technically competent filmmaking and a well-crafted work of horror. The film feels incredibly fresh, both in its presentation and its subject matter. The film nails the presentation of “the Backrooms” themselves, in its sprawling layout, sound design, visual textures, and the surprises Parsons packs deep into the structure. There’s perhaps a political reading of the imagery, connecting the soullessness and desolation of American capitalist office culture and the horror evoked through the empty beige rooms and screaming fluorescent lights; however, the film itself doesn’t play into that line of thinking. The film’s colouring is exceptional. It doesn’t just douse everything in yellow and hope for the best, as a lesser version of this concept might be tempted to do. Instead, the colouring is still dynamic and rich, even as the tube lights pound relentlessly onto the characters. In one of the best visual flourishes, cinematographer Jeremy Cox sneaks aberrations into the edges of the lighting sources, demonstrating the cracks in reality in light itself. There are two particularly excellent found-footage sequences, which I won’t give away here, that make for the film’s most terrifying moments. It’s not just the backrooms themselves that are a source of dread: even the sequences set in the real world have an eerie, abandoned quality. The furniture store never receives a customer, no scene has more than three actors, and parking lots are devoid of cars.
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| Photo via A24. |
Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve take centre stage as Clark and Mary, Backrooms’ two protagonists, with Clark holding onto the first half of the film and Mary stepping up in the second. Ejiofor (the Academy Award-nominated lead of 12 Years a Slave) adds a certain gravitas and depth to Clark that might be missing from a less skilled performer. When Reinsve (of The World Person in the World, Sentimental Value, and now, Palme d’Or-winner Fjord fame) pivots into the film’s lead towards the back half of the story, she doesn’t quite have as much to work with as Ejiofor does, but certainly makes a strong go of it. The characters come from a so-so screenplay, the film’s greatest drawback, which keeps me from embracing Backrooms as much as I would like to. It is challenging to make a strong narrative out of what is functionally a hyper-specific mood, and the narrative and characterization are where the film shows its seams. Clark and Mary don’t have much by way of true depth. Sure, some flashbacks help create a story about Mary’s agorophobic mother and Clark’s therapy sessions define his broken marriage, but these character details seem more incidental than they are vital to the plot, even when the third act tries its best to tie it all back in.
A couple of weeks ago, I called Curry Barker’s Obsession an “optimistic” piece of filmmaking for how it demonstrated the skills of an almost entirely “newbie” cast and crew in a very commercially successful manner. While the film isn’t quite as stuffed with newcomers as Obsession is (an Academy Award nominee in your cast breaks that pretty quickly), Backrooms belongs in the same conversation as the second YouTuber-turned-filmmaker in as many weeks to open an explosive original horror hit. Parsons is up for the challenge as a filmmaker, indicating a very exciting path ahead for him. The screenplay might drag the film down in its later sections, but the claustrophobic and unsettling emotional textures, thanks to the incredible editing, sound design, and visual stylings, keep Backrooms an engrossing and profoundly disquieting journey. The scares are unique and effective, while the film accesses deep-seated fears that others in the genre rarely operate in. The film magnifies the uncanny emptiness of the backrooms concept — the “liminal” space between use and disuse, as memory erodes purpose and action — into an incredibly punchy and original piece. Watch your step, or you might just fall in.
Backrooms is now playing in theatres.
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