‘Backrooms’ Review

The labyrinth of the mind.

Chiwetel Ejiofor in Backrooms. (Courtesy A24)

BACKROOMS IS A DEEPLY WEIRD, tremendously effective piece of filmmaking, a visual representation of the fractured modern mind and the intense pressure we all find ourselves under each and every day. Director Kane Parsons plays with perspective and point of view in a way that keeps the audience and the film’s characters alike off-balance, never letting us (or them) settle into one specific mode of terror.

For instance, the film opens as a found-footage horror movie set in the early 1990s. We see a man in a hazmat suit running for his life in what looks like an open-office hellscape, all yellow wallpaper and fluorescent overheads. What he’s running from is unclear, at least to us, but it’s enormous and terrifying and the constricted view of the VHS camera he’s using to shoot his sojourn only enhances our claustrophobia. When the unseen monster inevitably kills this unseen man, we get the title card and a jump to the film’s main characters, therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) and furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor).

Clark is a deeply unhappy individual, as we learn in his sessions with Mary. He resents the wife who has kicked him out of their home for his abusive, alcoholic outbursts; despite still paying for the house, he’s living in his pirate-themed furniture store. That he never seems to have any customers only adds to his sorrows, which include a mounting electricity bill caused by an unseen power drain.

That drain turns out to be the titular backrooms, and things get weird when Clark falls through a wall into the yellow-colored hellscape from the film’s opening moments. As he explores the bizarre limbo we see a world that is like an uncanny valley version of our own: hallways to nowhere; furniture jumbled in impossible ways, stairways seemingly to nowhere. It’s like an early AI prompt of an Escher drawing, just tangles of odd angles. Needless to say, Clark is freaked out, as are we, particularly when we catch a glimpse of the monster from the opening becoming aware of Clark’s presence.

Renate Reinsve in Backrooms. (Courtesy A24)

That’s all I’ll say about the plot; you should experience Backrooms as unaware as you can. Again, the thing I’m most struck by is the way that Parsons plays with genre expectations, grabbing willy-nilly from reference points and seamlessly melding them into something that feels both familiar and terrifyingly new. There’s the found-footage angle, alongside slasher jump scares, which are all nestled inside a fairly on-the-nose psychological thriller replete with doubles that David Lynch would love.

But it’s the use of space that has attracted the most attention, particularly this idea of the terror of so-called liminal spaces, strange pieces of unreality that dot our day-to-day existence. This movie is rife with them. The manufactured hominess of a therapist’s office, say; the false cheeriness of that safe space. Or the bizarre other-world that is a discount furniture outlet. We’ve all been inside one at some point—fresh out of college in search of a cheap couch; newly married and in need of a sectional to cement that we are Real Adults Now—and we’ve all been struck by the bizarre unreality of this huge mélange of a showroom rife with competing styles, clashing colors.

And then there are the backrooms themselves, with their aesthetic of office drone life merging with interchangeable two-bedroom, one-bath bungalows, an endless sea of modern young adult life for folks right around Parsons’s age, a ridiculously young 20. These shifting floorplans are referred to by one character as mere memories, or shadows of memories. But what they really represent is a manifestation of internal unhappiness, a plea for help in the form of a labyrinth of barely repressed self-loathing.

Backrooms is an astute examination of internalized modern torment, albeit one that tends toward explicit literalness at times. But subtlety is sometimes overrated, and this isn’t a movie that offers easy answers to go with its overtly stated questions. There are many backrooms left to explore. And one imagines that there will be more Backrooms to come after audiences get a chance to experience this one.