Directors: Kane Parsons
Writers: Will Soodik, Kane Parsons (based on the series by)
Starting as a ‘creepypasta’ post and then expanded by Kane Parsons in his YouTube video series, he was taped by A24 to make a feature version of his eerie videos, making him their youngest director, at just 19 years old. A combination of the ‘found-footage’ style seen in his YouTube videos and narrative elements scripted by Will Soodik, Backrooms is a unique and creepy exploration of an odd discovery and the memories and trappings that keep us looping in our own minds.
Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an alcoholic and a rather angry man who is struggling with both his failed relationship and his struggling discount furniture store. He attends therapy with Mary (Renate Reinsve), who sells her own self-help audio tapes, but is also struggling with her own memories of an abusive mother, while clinging onto some sense of the normality she had with her before it all took a dark turn.
Amidst some lights flickering and a drunken night spent sleeping in his own store, Clark discovers there’s an invisible doorway in the back of his store that leads to what seems to be a never-ending, empty version of his own store. At least, at first, that’s what it seems like. But he soon finds there’s more in the ‘backrooms’ than just an empty-looking office building. It’s as he describes, “like someone asked you to draw a dog after seeing one for the first time, but then got all of the details wrong.” Furniture protrudes from the room at funny angles, signs have their text written backwards, and the hallways go from left to right, then climb sideways and dive down at odd angles.
In his initial exploration of the area, it’s in capturing the same eerie feeling that the creepypasta post showed that Parsons gives us the same odd, empty feeling to watch the film. There’s nothing initially horrific or even that weird about what Clark is finding. It’s all just odd, but it’s the open spaces, the never-ending corridors, and the lack of sense to it all that makes it feel scary.
Both Ejiofor and Reinsve give strong performances here, at times playing off one another and, at others, conveying their inner and outer turmoil through nothing but their facial expressions. Some flashbacks and conversations help add information for us as viewers, but it’s within the context of these two characters and their personal struggles that Backrooms and how it may work begin to make more sense. It might not be as random as it all seems.
What Parsons has crafted with Backrooms is one of the most eerie films of recent memory, feeling like a darker take that combines Severance with the video game Portal and sprinkles in psychological horror elements you might see in Japanese and Korean genre films.
