Kane Parson’s “Backrooms”, much like the titular corridors and byways of unending complexity and madness, is a labyrinthine and uneven experience, one teetering between profundity and malaise. Perhaps this incongruity is the point. It’s not impossible to see the film’s charm as being a feature-length literalization of the fabled Kuleshov Effect, a filmmaking phenomenon that equates varied, and often wildly disparate, meaning to images according to what precedes and proceeds them. “The Backrooms” as a concept is rife for interpretation, considering its barest form of mindless fluorescent hallways is in no way objectively insidious, yet feels threatening; ever hovering in the subconscious space between banality and cosmic horror. While not the creator of the core concept, the twenty-year-old Parsons has himself become the most prolific chronicler of this ever-evolving cyber sandbox, establishing much of the lore and dimensionality of the idea through a series of self-produced YouTube videos that have garnered millions of views. While his video series, a byproduct of teaching himself the basics of CGI animation during the dog days of COVID lockdowns, has become its own genre of internet-style campfire story, it’s clear with his feature film debut that he is reaching for something less one-to-one, reinvention over adaptation. There is a stickiness elicited by “Backrooms”, a liminal wonderland that conjures equal parts wonder and dread depending on how you look at it, a feeling as personal as our worst nightmares and as universal as our wildest imaginings. As a deepening of the world he is most credited with mapping, Parsons seems eager to evolve this unkempt reality into something more than the fodder of Twitch Streamers and Creepy Pasta, to instead be a funhouse vision of humanity’s memories gone to rot. If this specificity, along with a devotion to pre-established lore, deadens the inherent terror of wandering a urine colored corporate world half remembered while stalked by nameless creatures, there is also something gained in the attempt to reach beyond the infinite to touch something more intimate, the collective unconscious made literal in a world gone mad.
“Backrooms” follows a down-on-his-luck furniture store owner named Clark (Academy Award Winner Chiwetel Ejiofor) as he struggles to regain some form of purpose in the aftermath of his divorce. An artist at heart who once aspired to be an architect, Clark feels suffocated by his paltry existence as a failing proprietor, languishing in his near-empty store when he’s not putting on a silly pirate hat and peg leg to film lo-fi commercials for local TV. He visits a therapist, Mary (Academy Award Nominee Renate Reinsve), as he works through the broiling anger he still feels for his ex-wife and his questions about the value of being alone. One night, while sleeping in the store with a bottle of booze for company, Clark stumbles onto something incredible: a seam in the wall of his store that leads into The Backrooms, a series of hallways and offices that look to be the product of a half-remembered dream. While at first he is terrified, he is soon fascinated with his discovery and begins detailing its dimensions obsessively. He tries to explain to Mary what he has found, yet she obviously won’t believe him. How could she? So, armed with a video camera and his hapless two-store employees, Clark ventures back into the Backrooms in search of proof. The thing about the Backrooms is that it’s larger than you think, and getting lost is not for the faint of heart, or of mind.
“Backrooms” is being released at an interesting moment for horror. As of this writing, the highest-grossing film at the domestic box office is another low-budget A24 released horror film made by a young filmmaker, Curry Baker’s “Obsession”. While “Obsession” is a film that I have several issues with and need to rewatch, which I don’t mind saying because apparently I am the only person on Earth who shares this opinion, there’s no denying the raw nerve that these “debut” films are effectively punching; each a byproduct of creators who cut their teeth on YouTube and are now broadening their appeal to a moviegoing audience. There are unsubstantiated rumors that Parsons was shadow-directed by Mark Duplass, an independent filmmaking legend who is also a cast member in “Backrooms”, as if the internet cannot fathom a twenty-year-old’s debut film being so polished. But, as with Baker, Parsons has honed a style that has not only evolved over the years but has, in his case, become generationally influential. That “Backrooms” looks and feels like a “real” movie is not surprising; what is of note, however, is how it is flawed. A simpler film, perhaps even a more successful one, would have doubled down on the scares, treating the endless hallways as a haunted house of unspeakable horrors with our heroes desperate to rip themselves back to reality. While there are elements of this throughout, including one particular sequence that feels like the maximization of the series’ YouTube beginnings, Parsons seems equally eager to unfurl the minds of our lead pair, Clark and Mary, pulling apart their traumas like taffy while allowing the “Backrooms” to be merely a receptacle for the creepy crawly bits buried inside their squishy parts. The best scene in the movie, in fact, has nothing to do with “Backrooms” as a concept and instead allows our two characters, one whose mind is long gone and the other trying desperately to hold to reality, to spar in a world where everything is made up, and the rules don’t matter. This sequence, which shares more than a few similarities with an iconic scene from “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”, is not the byproduct of internet brain rot but of a filmmaker searching for the right combination of images to speak to something complicated, uneasy, and raw about how we treat each other and ourselves. Not unlike the bug-eyed and ill-shaped denizens of the “Backrooms”, themselves a copy of a copy of a copy of someone real, Parsons’ film is seeking less a tangible shock than a feeling much more difficult to excavate. What the ultimate meaning is, I can’t fully say, yet I’ve been chewing on the ending of “Backrooms” since I walked out of the theater. Is it perfect? No. Is it overly scary? Not really. But it is interesting. If that’s not the sign of a filmmaker, I don’t know what is.
“Backrooms” is an odd film, though polished and unique in its oddity. As someone who has wandered the empty iridescence of office spaces riddled with cubicles and mountains of rolling chairs that were stacked by unknown forces an untold number of years before, I was less taken by the film’s depiction of liminal horror than by the cavernous melancholy of seeing the forgotten places in this world where the clocks stand forever still. Each space we are in now, even at this very moment, will one day become desolate and unremembered, whether in a year or in a million. Reality cares not for us. If it holds any nostalgia, it will be for the static things, the blameless things; the chairs and the signs and the dusty remains of a society long dead, most likely by its own hand. Perhaps that is the scariest part of it all, that time goes on when we do not, that our consumerism will outlive us all, that infinity was not meant for our minds to consider. But there’s a comfort as well. I suppose it all depends on how you look at it.
Be careful where you wander.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Backrooms” is playing at The Broad Theater and Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
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