The opening minutes of Kane Parsons’ directorial debut Backrooms are as good as old-school found footage horror gets. We’re stuck in the claustrophobic POV of a man wielding a VHS camera storming through endless office rooms and hallways, with floors draped in off-colored carpeting and walls slathered in sickly tints of coffee-stain yellow. The seemingly infinite space perfectly amplifies the dreadful sense of claustrophobia, as the anonymous cameraperson is clearly running away from something, but painfully unsure where he should run toward. Then, a pitch-perfect jumpscare propels this cold open into Backrooms‘ universe proper, after which things go downhill soon enough.
Hailed as America’s new cinema wunderkind, Parsons is the youngest director ever in the A24 stable, picked up by the studio and horror icons like James Wan of Saw fame to turn his viral YouTube series The Backrooms (2022) into a proper feature. Inspired by a creepypasta that made the rounds on 4chan’s paranormal-centric /x/ back in 2019, Parsons’ early CGI experiments in Blender were still pointedly non-narrative. He simply wanted to capture the demented nostalgia oozing from the liminal spaces that supernatural 4chan freaks were obsessing over: creepy, utilitarian environments, devoid of human life, filled instead with the powerful feeling of the Freudian uncanny. These are the egregious non-spaces we want to block from our collective memory, yet so omnipresent due to late capitalist homogenization that they themselves have become powerful vestiges of the cancerous monoculture we endure. Sandwiched between the faps of /gif/ and the e-fascist gatherings of /pol/, the /x/ board was imbuing a world we know all too well with the spiritual powers of the unknown.
If there was any narrative to speak of in Parsons’ YouTube series, it was opaque enough to not sit in the way of the vibe-heavy creepypasta, which out of context only gains in potency. At most, the occurrences of janky VHS-warped corporate logos and mysterious people walking around in hazmat suits hinted at some conspiratorial Dharma Initiative-esque experiments, thankfully kept as murky as the masterful television series Lost (2004–2010) — which perhaps unintentionally functions as a great reference point for Backrooms. Exactly here lies the central conflict of The Backrooms‘ translation to the big screen: how do you sustain a dreadful sense of mystery when your studio-backed project also demands narrative clarity?
Without going too deep into Backrooms‘ uneven plotting, the obvious answer to this question is trauma. Regrettably taking its cues from the elevated horror playbook, the seemingly infinite sequences of non-spaces are primarily presented here as a metaphor for the cumulative traumas of the film’s protagonists Clark and Mary. A failed architect, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) begrudgingly rots away in his unsuccessful furniture discount store, while his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) tries to steer him away from misanthropic resentment, despite harboring her own unresolved indignation toward humanity. Set in 1990, the retro aesthetics of Backrooms conveniently unpack their unease with modern society once Clark discovers that a wall in his store’s basement is actually a passageway to the titular parallel dimension.
In its first act, Backrooms still makes good on its promise as a contemporary horror classic, by fully immersing itself in this uncanny parallel dimension that a restless Clark obsessively starts to map out. The pleasure of joining him on his expeditions through these impressively crafted liminal spaces — this time mostly done through practical effects instead of CGI renders — approximates the sublime. Inevitably, though, most tension seeps out of Backrooms once Will Soodik’s screenplay begins to project Clark’s and Mary’s inner world onto this impossible place. As a kind of ironic reversal, it’s now their emotions that gnaw away at the nondescript yellow walls, instead of the other way around. In its laughably inert closing act, the film has disarmed any sense of dread or torment — even when it turns out a monstrous entity also inhabits the infinite loop of the backrooms.
It might be unfair to compare Parsons’ first entry into mainstream cinema with a literary masterpiece, but putting Backrooms next to Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) is nonetheless productive, as it reveals a conceptual error built into the foundation of this film. 4chan’s ever-expanding creepypasta was clearly inspired by Danielewski’s postmodern opus, in which a seemingly inconspicuous domicile suddenly houses a new door that leads to endless hallways with more doors, behind which only more hallways and doors await. Danielewski’s book was frustratingly ambitious by design, itself constructed as a literary hall of mirrors with texts within texts within texts. Riddled with footnotes, endnotes, appendix entries, and other postmodern chicanery, the intent of the troubled characters within the book was to somehow find meaning in this impossible and infinite space. Every expedition, every interpretation, every possible explanation, however, resulted in pointed nothingness — a literal void the characters and the text perpetually circle around.
Unsurprisingly, what is shaping up to become an A24 hit is not allowed to revolve around the notion of emptiness. Meaning has to reside somewhere in these endless backrooms, which is perfectly okay, were it not for the fact that Parsons and Soodik hand it to us so transparently. It puts all these gorgeously designed sets, pristinely framed by cinematographer Jeremy Cox, to waste. Ultimately, what awaits behind the backrooms of Clark’s store is an increasing sense of pointlessness as our protagonists descend further into uninspired madness.
DIRECTOR: Kane Parsons; CAST: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell; DISTRIBUTOR: A24; IN THEATERS: May 29; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 50 min.
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