Backrooms review: An unflinchingly eerie horror to take you down a creepy rabbit hole
This is an eye-catching debut feature from 20-year-old Kane Parsons.
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- Jeremy Aspinall
★★★★☆
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Liminal space is the pervasive element of this unflinchingly eerie sci-fi horror from YouTuber-turned-film director Kane Parsons. For the uninitiated, liminal spaces are familiar areas (hallways, classrooms, stairwells) where the absence of living things, especially people, can produce a disquieting, almost otherworldly atmosphere.
Images posted on the internet of the Backrooms, a vast expanse of interconnected rooms, went viral in 2019 and inspired a series of unnerving short films from Parsons in 2022, laying the foundations for the 20-year-old’s eagerly anticipated feature debut.
Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, a disgruntled American furniture-store manager, whose career as an architect has foundered along with his marriage and who’s now being encouraged by his therapist, Dr Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), “to forge a new path”.
But the man’s business – Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire – is not thriving either, obliging Clark to film an ad where he decides to dress as a one-legged pirate instead of a sultan, much to the bemusement of his stoner assistant (Finn Bennett).
Clark is sleeping in the store at night having been kicked out by his wife, which is when he accidentally comes across an invisible doorway in the basement, and a labyrinthine, seemingly endless world of blandly decorated rooms, alcoves and winding corridors is revealed.
Chiwetel Ejiofor in Backrooms. A24
But this is no Narnia or Wonderland, because the further the perplexed but curious Clark goes down this particular rabbit hole, the creepier and more warped the spaces become, with pieces of furniture, various signs, random doorways and chutes to lower depths appearing, only in off-kilter positions. Meanwhile, the only sound to be heard is from the constant hum of fluorescent light. That is until more disconcerting noises and thumps elevate an air of slow-burning menace.
Could anyone else be there? Or is something more monstrous lurking? Or, more generally, what the heck is going on?
Films like 2019’s Vivarium (Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots trapped in an inescapable neighbourhood of identical houses) and the recently released Exit 8 (man in an endless looping subway corridor) have made a chilling virtue of the seemingly banal masking visceral and existential terror, and Backrooms is no different, only on a vaster scale.
It’s an eye-catching debut feature from Parsons whose adoption of the previously over-used found-footage formula to garner scares is deftly utilised, even offering clues as to the reality of the situation. Meanwhile, the surreal shifts and turns that occur as Clark travels deeper into an infinite dimension of rooms mean you are never quite sure what the endgame will be, especially once Clark’s therapist is compelled to investigate her patient’s apparent disappearance.
Ejiofor is at his hangdog best and is matched by Reinsve (Oscar-nominated this year for Norwegian drama Sentimental Value), whose calm, enigmatic exterior masks a mystery from her own past.
However, the real star here is the setting and its fascinating metamorphosis from the bland to the downright uncanny.
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And for Parsons, it will be interesting to see what he does next, although there is plenty of room for a further exploration of the weird world behind the wall.
Authors
Jeremy Aspinall
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