A24 has greenlit the film “Backrooms,” bringing an internet-born concept to the big screen, marking the commodification of a cultural product that originated from anonymous collective labor. The film is the product of an idea that began in 2019 with an anonymous post on 4chan creepypasta, an online repository for internet-created urban legends. This anonymous post, now in its seventh year, provided the initial image and description of the seemingly infinite Backrooms.
Twenty-year-old YouTuber-turned-filmmaker Kane Parsons, who posts under “Kane Pixels,” later expanded the concept in his YouTube series, adding a found footage approach. The film, directed by Parsons, is described as a fitfully unsettling nightmare that never convincingly builds beyond its creepy, dated-decor premise. Its release by A24 transforms a collectively generated online phenomenon into a marketable commodity within the capitalist cultural industry.
The Alienation of Capital
The narrative centers on Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, the owner of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a furniture store described as sad and empty. This business is located in a 1990s strip mall, a setting that itself speaks to the decay of localized capital and the shifting landscapes of consumption under advanced capitalism. Clark grapples with concerns over his failed architect aspirations, the end of his marriage, and a persistent lack of customers, alongside unexplained electric troubles at his store.
When Clark investigates the flickering lights and irregular circuit breakers, he unwittingly passes through a wall and into the Backrooms. These Backrooms are depicted as seemingly never-ending chambers that resemble vacant, nondescript office spaces, but stranger, like art installation versions of office space. They contain piles of furniture, shrunken doors, and random objects, including a stop sign and a cardboard cutout, symbolizing the discarded waste and disorienting logic of capitalist production and its workplaces.
Clark later describes the rooms as though they were made “by a bunch of construction workers on acid.” The review notes that the uncanny dimensions and strange recesses of modern workplaces have become a common motif, from “Severance” to “The Chair Company,” highlighting the pervasive alienation experienced within contemporary labor structures.
Individual Solutions vs. Systemic Decay
The film introduces Clark’s therapist, Mary Kline, played by Renate Reinsve, whose new book is titled “The Window Within.” Mary offers individualistic psychological counsel, telling Clark in a session, “We all have our loops, our habits.” This approach frames systemic issues as personal psychological struggles, a common liberal response that diverts attention from material conditions. The subterranean labyrinth increasingly resembles a warped version of Clark’s own looped psychology, yet Mary herself becomes trapped within the same physical structure, exposing the limits of individual introspection against overwhelming material forces.
The review states that as a horror film, “Backrooms” does not quite work, failing to bridge its “very physical, wall-to-wall-carpeted labyrinth with Clark’s mental state.” This inability underscores the inadequacy of psychological frameworks to address or escape the material realities of a system that produces such alienating environments. Despite what the review calls a “paper-wall-thin concept,” Ejiofor and Reinsve are noted for giving the film some depth, with Ejiofor embracing a “latent capacity for fevered mania” and Reinsve giving the movie a “slinky intelligence.”
The true star of the film is identified as Danny Vermette’s production design, which is described as both banal and bizarre. This aestheticization of capitalist decay, presenting the Backrooms as a “mysterious rabbit hole,” further illustrates how the cultural industry can package and sell the very symptoms of systemic breakdown. The film, 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, now an A24 release in theaters Friday.