Backrooms Review

How do you adapt a no-budget, avant-garde, YouTube-based anthology series like Backrooms into a mainstream feature film? You could point to Skinamarink as an experimental horror that received a theatrical release. But it was acquired out of a festival, and never reached one thousand screens. Conversely, A24 approached Kane Parsons about adapting his own series into a feature, meaning he had an actual budget and could expect a wide release. For a first-time filmmaker who wants to keep working, that usually means crafting something general audiences have some hope of liking, not just the built-in fandom. So it’s unsurprising that he opted not to simply replicate the ultra lo-fi, context-less presentation within which a story gradually emerges over a series of vignettes, where the dialog is as likely to be as flat and expressionless as a corporate training video as it is someone anxiously wondering what the hell is going on.

That said, Parsons did what he could to port it into the larger, more traditional story penned by Will Soodik. As if to assure his fans that what they came for would get here eventually, the opening scene is more or less a re-edited remaster of his very first first Backrooms YouTube video. Until we reach the title card, the camera is entirely first-person, complete with a bunch of whip pans as the unseen, hazmat suit cloaked character looks around the space and investigates the various strange noises, the outstanding sound design (from Eugenio Battaglia and Robert W. Booth) ensuring we feel as tense as they must be.

After that, we leave the space to allow the narrative time to establish a foothold, and the movie’s biggest problem comes into focus: the drama is bland and boring. In a clever bid to disguise this weakness, it becomes part of the point, as Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) begins to lose his grip on his sanity, depressed by the sad state in which he’s found his life. Recently divorced, running a failing furniture store, and holding onto his dream of being an architect, he can neither accept the reality of his situation nor take any responsibility for it. Discussions with his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) aren’t very productive, either, while her reliance on non-specific and cliched turns of phrase repel engagement and insight. She’s got her own hang-ups, stuck on what it was like as a child to watch her single mother’s mental health deteriorate, as well as the more recent failure of her book, “The Window Within”, to go anywhere.

For all the time spent showing us Mary’s memories, Clark’s neuroses are what drive us forward, leading him to discover the permeable wall in the basement of his business, Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. Ejiofor is enthusiastically up for the task, his anxious energy feeling even more appropriate once surrounded by those yellow walls. His demeanor is infectious and concerning, especially when he continues to press on despite the growing terrors. The space is like a misremembered advertisement for a local business, which just so happens to be the same space occupied by the store, both literally and figuratively. There are references to its past decorations, allusions to his commercials, old banners growing out of the walls, and an incredible amount of furniture, much of it immovable. It quickly becomes clear that we’re delving into Clark’s psyche, nearly as warped as the real thing.

Despite Parsons’ first video going up in early 2022 (and the original static image coming long before that), the endless corridors and overall aesthetic of “copies of reality that are just wrong enough to be unsettling” reads quite well as an allegory for generative AI, to say nothing of the so-called “Still Lifes” that emerge later. But part of what makes the movie so engaging is how little it explains itself, while Clark’s periodic discoveries give the sense Parsons knows the answers, and just isn’t telling us.

Until he does. He refrains from explaining exactly how the Backrooms work or their origins or broader lore like that. Rather, as Mary is drawn into the space by Clark’s calm, cryptic voicemail, the third act devolves into a more directly expository confrontation of how this all connects to him, and by extension, her. Along with a single, brief scene addressing why we’ve been periodically shown a silent scientist (Mark Duplass) watching them through a screen, Parsons manages to simultaneously give us too much and nowhere near enough, focusing on questions to which we already have the answers while ignoring the inexplicable. Some such details are contained within the series (more details on Async, hints as to why the movie is set in mid-1990, etc), but to give movie-only audiences almost nothing is far more frustrating than completely nothing.

The finished product is quite uneven, its storytelling weighed down further by its self-seriousness, with the only hint of a break being a few comments from his employees, Kat and Bobby (Lukita Maxwell and Finn Bennett). But the Backrooms stuff really works, not exactly “scary” most of the time, but suitably haunting, the sense of dread further dialed up by Parsons and Edo van Breemen’s blissed out riff on the music from Portal. The lo-fi digital camerawork emerges naturally from the time period, but ensures the extensive VFX required to pull this off generally looks excellent. The variety of areas they encounter all have their own unsettling vibe, and there are so many perfect details of the production design that aid in making it all feel so wrong.

That a twenty-year-old with no experience in the industry or formal film education was able to pull this off is quite impressive, even before considering its massive opening weekend. This should launch him into the stratosphere, ideally allowing his next project to more boldly embrace the experimental sensibility that is so obviously where his interests (and skill set) lie. For truly avant-garde art to make its way to thousands of screens around the world would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. But along with the insane heater Obsession is currently on, it’s beginning to feel like anything is possible on the shoulders of these young creatives.