‘Backrooms’ Should Be a Labyrinth with No End

Warning: Review contains some spoilers

“Backrooms,” the directorial debut of 21-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons, is not a horror film in any traditional sense. It’s more of a distorted dreamscape than a bloody thriller, where logic is non-existent and normal is silently disquieting. Parsons’ attempt to demystify the “Backrooms” concept takes away from what originally made the internet-dreamed space interesting. 

The “Backrooms” concept stems from a 4chan thread and a single image of a large, empty room with dull beige carpet, yellow wallpaper and dim fluorescent lights. It’s a stifling liminal space, and the atmospheric eeriness the concept’s founding image evokes is what Parsons sought to hold throughout the film’s 105 minutes. Parsons turns a mundane physical space, a furniture warehouse called Cap’n Clark’s in a Santa Clara strip mall, owned by resentful middle-aged Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), into an “uncanny valley” reflection of itself, with a portal-esque wall that leads to the seemingly unending backrooms. 

Aside from brief cuts to the outside world, Parsons accomplishes this by holding the tension within the backrooms space, but by doing so, he sacrifices real-world building and plot structure to explain the bizarre and inherently inexplicable. He explains the hostile entities lurking within the backrooms itself, the cause of a rising number of missing persons cases, as a pirate-puppet version of Clark and seemingly ties the parallel world to Clark’s psychological state. Said pirate-puppet version of Clark also eats real-world Clark after he attempts to follow reason and to allow his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), to leave the backrooms. Mary ventures into the backrooms to find him and encounters strange non-human figures connected to Clark in real life, such as a red-headed woman with many fractured faces, likely a reflection of Clark’s ex-wife, who left him before the film’s beginning.

Parsons had also previously developed a YouTube webseries based on the concept, and the series touches on an MRI company that investigates the backrooms that comes up in the film, but without prior knowledge of the webseries, it makes no sense in the A24 production. There are bizarre cuts to a man who appears to be supervising or looking into the backrooms, and interacts with Mary at the end of the film, but there are no clues as to what this means in the context of the film as a whole.

Parsons does not answer any of the questions “Backrooms” raises, and any attempts to explain the movie end in a spiral with no end in sight. The plot is labyrinthine, open to interpretation to the point the plot falls apart at the seams if one attempts to deconstruct what the film is actually saying. It cannot be analyzed, and the plot is abstracted to the point of surreal absurdity. An attempt at the end to explain the backrooms, why they exist, leaves more questions than answers.

7/10