Who Owns the Nightmare
The meme-rooted film “Backrooms” has been greenlit by A24 and pushed onto the big screen, turning an internet-born concept into a studio product that the review says is more interesting in its backstory than in its result. The film is directed by 20-year-old YouTuber-turned-filmmaker Kane Parsons, who has posted under “Kane Pixels,” and the review describes it as a fitfully unsettling nightmare that never convincingly builds beyond its creepy, dated-decor premise.
The Backrooms idea began in 2019 with an anonymous post on 4chan creepypasta, described as an online repository for internet-created urban legends. That post supplied the first image of the seemingly infinite Backrooms and the caption about “nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz.” Parsons took that material and expanded it in his YouTube series, adding a found footage approach before the concept was hauled into the machinery of theatrical release.
Inside the Corporate Labyrinth
In the film, Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is the not-exactly-proud owner of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a sad and empty furniture store in a 1990s strip mall. Clark is dealing with failed architect aspirations, the end of his marriage and the lack of customers, while unexplained electric troubles at the store keep nagging at him. The lights keep flickering. When Clark inspects the circuit breaker, he finds odd, irregular breakers at the bottom of the panel and later goes looking in the store’s lower floor before unwittingly passing through the wall and into the Backrooms.
The Backrooms are described as seemingly never-ending chambers that almost resemble vacant, nondescript office spaces, but stranger, like art installation versions of office space. There are piles of furniture, shrunken doors and random objects such as a stop sign and a cardboard cutout with a cassette player saying hello in different languages. Clark later describes the rooms as though they were made “by a bunch of construction workers on acid.” The review says the uncanny dimensions and strange recesses of modern workplaces have been a common motif lately, from “Severance” to “The Chair Company,” and that the endless iterations of the Backrooms can be seen as a metaphor for the internet itself.
Loops, Doors, and the People Stuck Inside
The movie also features Clark’s therapist, Mary Kline, played by Renate Reinsve. Mary tells Clark in a session, “We all have our loops, our habits.” The subterranean labyrinth increasingly resembles a warped version of Clark’s own looped psychology, and its many doors go deeper into his psyche. Mary, whose new book is titled “The Window Within,” becomes trapped too.
The review says that as a horror, fluorescent-lit riff on Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Backrooms” does not quite work. It says the movie finds a potentially insightful pathway to a story but cannot bridge its very physical, wall-to-wall-carpeted labyrinth with Clark’s mental state, concluding that a movie with so many doors ultimately cannot find the right one.
Despite what the review calls a paper-wall-thin concept, Ejiofor and Reinsve give the film some depth. Ejiofor is described as having almost always been a supremely level-headed screen presence, but here embracing a latent capacity for fevered mania. Reinsve, identified as the star of “The Worst Person in the World” and “Sentimental Value,” is said to be especially absorbing in her first horror film and to give the movie a slinky intelligence.
The review says the real star is Danny Vermette’s production design, describing it as banal and bizarre at once and calling the Backrooms a mysterious rabbit hole. It adds that horror films have long found trouble down the stairs, but the movies, like 2022’s “Barbarian,” seem to be digging even deeper, and says it is no wonder the movie gets lost down there too. The film is an A24 release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language and some violent content/bloody images, runs 105 minutes and receives two stars out of four.