Backrooms Review

The Architecture of Dread in Backrooms

By: Marc Kozak

Backrooms

The Architecture of Dread in Backrooms

By: Marc Kozak

Most of us have experienced that special sense of unease that comes with walking through a dark train station hallway or barely lit airport terminal. On a surface level, that feeling is pretty easy to understand – there’s always going to be a hint of danger in a shadowy, unfamiliar public place where you don’t know who or what could be lurking around the next corner. But these transitional areas also churn up other emotions that are harder to define, an odd byproduct of paying attention to a space that was essentially designed to be ignored. These are areas with the sole purpose of bringing you from one place to another, barely places by themselves, an un-place that you would never spend time thinking about unless you’re stuck in one. And in those moments, you might start to wonder about other un-places you’ve never noticed or even get a bit nostalgic about things or places you’ve overlooked, lost, or ignored.

These strange, existential feelings about liminal spaces have fascinated an ever-growing number of people over the last several years, with many corners of the internet dedicated to exploring and even creating these kinds of disquieting places. 20-year-old Kane Parsons has become the face of this movement, taking a prompt that originated in a 2019 4chan thread and creating a wildly popular series of YouTube shorts called The Backrooms, in which explorers try to navigate a seemingly infinite series of shifting office building corridors that lead to nowhere, full of strange objects and potentially malevolent entities. A24 approached Parsons to create a full-length movie adaptation of his web series, and the result is Backrooms, a mesmerizing and deeply unsettling piece of work driven almost completely by surreal images and haunting production design. While it may stumble a bit by trying to cram in story and character moments – both of which the movie could honestly almost do away with completely, as strange as it is to say – there’s no denying that Parsons has effectively brought a very exciting and uniquely strange vision to life.

After a hair-raising opening sequence teases the dangers that lie ahead, we meet Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a bitter and eternally frustrated owner of a failing pirate-themed used furniture store. His 90s-style strip mall warehouse is far too big for the amount of furniture in the store and feels even bigger due to the perpetual lack of customers. Clark tells his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), about how he abandoned his dreams of becoming an architect and poured his entire life into the store, which has left him with nothing more than a divorce, a drinking problem, and serious anger issues to show for it. Clark, whose life is such that he has taken to spending nights in his own showroom, is woken one night by strange power surges that lead him to the building’s basement, where he stumbles through a portal in a wall into the world of the Backrooms, a series of yellow walls and fluorescent lights, rooms sparsely populated with strange furniture and bizarre objects.

" Backrooms contains images that you’ve likely never seen before, and they will doubtlessly stick with you long after you’ve left the theater.  "

Clark is fascinated by this illogically massive labyrinth, dedicating more and more time to wandering and mapping its halls. These scenes are utterly engrossing, and it’s hard to resist leaning forward in your seat to see what waits around the next corner, neurons firing as questions start to form. What exactly is this space? Has it been created or let loose by the mysterious Async Research Institute? Is it somehow being affected by Clark’s memory or experiences, bringing in objects that he’s recently interacted with? Is it another dimension, or a space created by extra-dimensional beings attempting to mimic humanity? There are no answers here (thankfully), giving it an alien feeling similar to Annihilation – it just IS, in all of its glorious strangeness. Parsons and production designer Danny Vermette populate each room with objects phased into the walls and floors, mysterious pools of water and televisions plugged into unknown power sources, all while shadows seem to move and strange sounds get closer and closer. It’s marvelously haunting stuff.

Things escalate when Clark enlists his two employees, Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and Bobby (Finn Bennett), to help him further explore the Backrooms, leading to a breathtaking chase sequence through stranger and stranger rooms as the crew is stalked by some kind of violent entity. After a few days pass and appointments are missed, Mary heads over to the furniture store to see what’s going on before inevitably getting sucked into the Backrooms herself.

It’s at this point where the story, such as it is, tries to assert itself, using flashbacks of Mary’s childhood to attempt to give some kind of meaning to her journey. We also start to suspect there’s some kind of bridge between Clark’s current psyche and the nature of the entity stomping through the Backrooms, which eventually reveals itself in a somewhat clumsy fashion. You can see what Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik are going for with these two characters, but the way their internal struggles relate to the Backrooms seems tenuous at best. I can understand the desire to have some kind of thematic material here, and Mary’s eventual blow-up at Clark is effective enough to drive home the points being made, but it all just distracts from the main attraction – wandering through the Backrooms. Even the movie’s final third introduces crumbs of lore (likely familiar to fans of the YouTube series) that are just interesting enough to latch on to, and certainly enough to propel any future sequels. Still, it’s hard to say if people would be more or less amenable to a Backrooms movie that is exclusively vibes and no plot – for my part, I would be more than okay with it.

Ejiofor and Reinsve are both sturdy enough actors to fill in some of the gaps left by the lack of narrative material. Ejiofor naturally exudes a kind of rationality and pragmatism that automatically gives his character the impression that he’s behaving as well as can be expected under otherworldly circumstances, and his eventual descent into madness feels all the more impactful because of it. Reinsve is able to carry both a penetrating intelligence and a deep loneliness in her eyes, which gives her performance a substantial weight despite her lack of dialogue (or even much of a character arc). Both of these veteran performers lend a palpable sense of maturity to the entire project, even if their characters are largely overpowered by the setting itself.

Still, while some might lament the lack of meaningful narrative thrust, it’s hard to overstate how dizzyingly spectacular the image-making is. This is a movie designed to provoke an uncomfortable feeling, to utilize mere space as a source of horror and dread instead of the usual gore and jump scares. It’s refreshing to see a filmmaker tap into the deep, primal fear of the unknown, and embrace its very strangeness without trying to explain or even make much sense of it. For those who haven’t engaged with any of the online Backrooms content, there will likely be images here that you’ve never seen before, and they will doubtlessly stick with you long after you’ve left the theater. These aren’t necessarily new ideas – the transformation of mundane spaces into places of horror has been explored in books like Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” or recent media like Severance or Exit 8 – but Backrooms is sure to be the new standard when it comes to the exploration of liminal space in modern media, and the introduction of a different kind of eerie, existential wrongness to a whole new generation.