The film “Backrooms,” greenlit by A24, brings an internet meme to the big screen, transforming an anonymous online post from 2019 into a mainstream cultural product. This shift highlights the ongoing redefinition of cultural production, moving from decentralized online origins to corporate-backed cinema, often at the expense of traditional narrative forms.
The concept of the Backrooms originated in its seventh year, from an anonymous post on 4chan creepypasta, an online repository for internet-created urban legends. The initial post provided an image of seemingly infinite Backrooms, accompanied by a description of “nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz.” Director Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old YouTuber-turned-filmmaker known as “Kane Pixels,” expanded this online concept into a YouTube series using a found footage approach, before its elevation to a major studio release.
The Landscape of Decline
The film centers on Clark, portrayed by Chiwetel Ejiofor, the owner of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a furniture store described as sad and empty within a 1990s strip mall. Clark's character is depicted with concerns over his failed architect aspirations, the dissolution of his marriage, and a notable absence of customers, reflecting a broader economic and social malaise affecting the native population.
Clark's unwitting entry into the Backrooms occurs after investigating unexplained electric troubles and flickering lights in his store, leading him through a wall into the labyrinthine spaces. These Backrooms are characterized as seemingly never-ending chambers resembling vacant, nondescript office spaces, filled with piles of furniture, shrunken doors, and random objects, including a cardboard cutout with a cassette player saying hello in different languages, a subtle nod to enforced diversity within a sterile environment.
Clark himself describes the rooms as though they were made “by a bunch of construction workers on acid,” underscoring the disorienting and artificial nature of these environments. The review notes that the uncanny dimensions and strange recesses of modern workplaces have become a common motif in contemporary media, suggesting a pervasive cultural theme of alienation and rootlessness in an increasingly fragmented society.
Elite Interests and Cultural Fragmentation
The film's narrative further explores this theme through Clark’s therapist, Mary Kline, played by Renate Reinsve, who states, “We all have our loops, our habits.” Mary, author of a new book titled “The Window Within,” also becomes trapped within the subterranean labyrinth, which increasingly mirrors Clark’s own “looped psychology,” a reflection of the internal struggles within a disoriented populace.
The review identifies the film's production design by Danny Vermette as its “real star,” describing the Backrooms as both banal and bizarre, a “mysterious rabbit hole.” This aesthetic choice emphasizes the sterile, interchangeable environments that increasingly define modern existence, a metaphor the review itself suggests for the internet, a globalizing force that often supplants local culture.
Despite the performances by Ejiofor and Reinsve, the review concludes that the film, with its “paper-wall-thin concept,” ultimately “cannot find the right one” among its many doors, failing to bridge its physical labyrinth with Clark’s mental state. This assessment points to a broader cultural struggle to find coherence or meaning within fragmented, post-national narratives, a symptom of managed decline.