Backrooms Is A Visionary Setting In Search Of A Great Story

Every generation has its own idea of what horror should look like. In the creaky old days of Hammer Films, it looked like a Gothic castle, complete with a cobwebbed crypt. By the Stephen King era in the 1980s, fear had moved into the abandoned house at the end of the block in an all-American small town. And given how much time the members of Gen Z and Generation Alpha spend online, it makes sense that the spaces that capture their imaginations would be virtual as well. Enter Backrooms and its creator, 21-year-old Kane Parsons.

Parsons was still in high school when he uploaded “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” to YouTube, building on a growing fascination with “liminal horror” that reframes abandoned malls, industrial hallways, and buzzing fluorescent lights from neutral spaces into sites of eldritch terror. That video, which has since racked up an astounding 78 million views, was made with the computer-graphics software Blender; only now, with the backing of A24, have the Backrooms become a real place, a 30,000-square-foot complex that was created for the live-action film version of Parsons' web series.

It should be mentioned here that a lot of Backrooms lore exists online, although you don’t have to study it before seeing the film. In fact, it probably helps to go in blind — all the better to be discombobulated by the film’s unique setting. The opening scene of Backrooms calls back to Parsons’ original video, as an unseen cameraman reacts with panic after materializing in a mysterious space made up of infinitely repeating rooms, all of them with the same yellow wallpaper and musty-looking carpet. He explores for a while, until a pixelated creature emerges from behind a shadowy corner; the cameraman freaks out, and the feed is cut.

The world-building in Backrooms is coy, suggesting the outline of a grand sci-fi/horror plot while actually explaining very little about it. At times, it feels like watching a video game, as the characters explore environments and encounter threats before circling back to where they began. As we learn over time, everyone’s experience in the Backrooms is different: Whatever's controlling this sinister liminal space likes to torture people by incorporating their personal traumas into what they find there, fracturing familiar images into surrealist echoes of their real lives.

These include pieces of furniture that merge into the walls and floors, as well as banners and signs that break down ordinary messages — a sale, maybe, or a grand opening — into gibberish. Each of these bizarre details makes a little more sense as the story continues and Parsons pulls back to reveal more the movie’s “real-world” setting. Backrooms is set in 1990, so it follows that the cinematography is VHS-coded; similarly, the production design draws heavily from the pastel Southwestern aesthetic that was popular around the turn of that decade.

Emphasis is placed on the mundane and the mass-produced, creating a detached, impersonal setting that reflects the barren inner lives of the lonely, isolated characters. Frankly, the reason why it’s taken six paragraphs to even mention the characters in Backrooms is because they’re not all that interesting: Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, an architect-turned-furniture salesman who owns the creatively (and confusingly) named Cap’N Clark’s Ottoman Empire in the suburbs of Silicon Valley. Clark is recently divorced, and comes with all the cliched baggage one would expect from a man in his situation; strapped for cash, he sleeps in the store, where he drinks himself to sleep every night and nurtures his resentment.

It’s while he’s knocking around the store late one night that Clark first “no-clips” into the Backrooms, falling through the wall and into the buzzing interdimensional no-man’s-land that’s the reason for this movie’s existence. Over time, he draws his employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett) into the mystery, followed in turn by his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), who believes that the Backrooms are a delusion right up until she falls into them. Mary has some predictable baggage of her own, which becomes important as she wanders deeper into the mysterious space and discovers that she’s not alone.

Parsons did not write the script for Backrooms; that job went to television writer Will Soodik, who overcorrects for the film’s uncanny setting with a routine screenplay. It may be smart to streamline the story when there’s so much going on aesthetically, but between the rote characters, barebones plot, and awkward exposition dumps, Backrooms fails to live up to its storytelling potential. A series of intense, claustrophobic chase scenes do make up for this by distracting viewers and keeping them on edge up until the sudden, cryptic ending. But it’s hard to deny that the Backrooms themselves are more interesting what’s happening in them.

Parsons undoubtedly has an eye: His placement of the horizon in a series of striking establishing shots proves all by itself that he has talent as a director. His vision for Backrooms is filled with odd and unsettling details, and draws from tasteful influences like Stanley Kubrick (there’s more than a little 2001: A Space Odyssey in the design here) and David Lynch, specifically the supernatural threshold of Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge. Our young director has done an excellent job building a stage. If only the play were worthy of it.

From A24, Backrooms debuts in theaters on May 29.