Coming from humble beginnings, YouTube horror film director Kane Parsons released his feature-length debut, “Backrooms,” to both critical praise and box office success. Released on May 7, “Backrooms” is a psychological horror film centered around a faulty alternate reality, described in the film as “if you asked a person who’s never seen a dog to draw a picture of a dog.” In essence, the broad strokes are the same but the details are off.
“Backrooms” follows failing furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) for the majority of its runtime. Clark is led into the basement of his store due to power fluctuations while staying overnight, where he finds an oddly lit section of wall. This wall turns out to be a doorway leading into the Backrooms, which Clark briefly explores. Clark later recruits his store’s assistant manager, Kat (Lukita Maxwell), and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett) to explore and record video evidence of the Backrooms. The trio are attacked by an unknown entity and separated.
Weeks later, Mary (Renate Reinsve) — Clark’s therapist — receives an answering machine message from Clark, leading her to search for him and enter the Backrooms. Clark, having gone entirely insane, subdues and kidnaps Mary. The pair briefly converses before Clark frees Mary, however they are cornered by the entity, now revealed to be a horrifying copy of Clark, dressed as his store’s mascot.
Clark is devoured by it as Mary escapes. Mary is then chased through a variety of esoteric spaces, eventually being trapped in a replica of Clark’s furniture store, where she fights off the monster with a piece of concrete and an accidentally activated Async corporation gas trap.
Mary is finally taken into Async custody for questioning. The movie ends with progressively more surreal Backroom’s recreations of Mary’s childhood home, ending with a shot of a malformed copy of her.
The plot of “Backrooms” works very well for the film. The characters and their respective stories fit the setting and themes of the movie exactly as they should, and the dialogue is never clunky or unnatural, making the characters and their experiences feel all the more real.
“Backrooms” is not a horror film in the traditional sense. There are no jumpscares, very little gore and only a few moments which really scare.
Rather than seeking to disturb through horrifying creatures or over the top gore, “Backrooms” is more a showcase of Parson’s penchant for highly surreal imagery. Objects are frequently interconnected in ways which they should not be, including chairs which sprout from one another and steering wheels from 16th century sailing ships clipping through walls and other objects. Entire neighborhoods are contained within the Backrooms, a space inspired by an empty office building. The walls can be a floor and rooms are filled with random objects in placements and quantities that just don’t make sense.
The standout set piece of “Backrooms” comes near the end of the film, in the form of an endless pit lined with entirely random rooms, the only entrance being a door leading onto a small ledge overhanging the void and the only exit a thin staircase leading to a single door in the ceiling. There’s simply no way to wrap your head around it. It cannot be fully understood because there is no method to the madness, nothing to be understood in pure randomness.
On top of imagery, “Backrooms” also manages to nail its pacing. There is no one scene or act of the film that seems to stretch on, nor any that feels as if it was cut off prematurely. The movie has a perfect runtime of 105 minutes and devotes every subject therein the exact amount of time it needs.
One problem with “Backrooms” is that watching the original online series, or the innumerable breakdowns of said series, is almost required to understand the nuances of the movie’s plot. For example, to one who had no prior knowledge of “Backrooms,” who Async is and how they found the Backrooms would be entirely unknown, with only a subpar explanation given in the last few minutes of the film. The only reason “Backrooms” can mostly get away with this is because of the general vagueness that accompanies the movie.
The film leaves many of the questions it or the viewer poses unanswered. Yet this vagueness is not the product of amateur writing so much as the fact that there can be no answers. Not only do the characters lack answers themselves, but there is no explanation of what the Backrooms is that will be nearly as interesting as the mystery. In cases like this, understanding will always be disappointing, so the best choice for the director and writer of the film is simply to withhold it. This is not to say that the necessity for speculation hurts the film. In fact, it brews greater engagement with the piece, which is easily a positive. The online theory mill surrounding Parson’s works has only further accelerated since the transition of the series from the internet to the silver screen.
However, the elephant in the room must be addressed: the ending. While the tension throughout the film and setup are immaculate, the ending didn’t live up to its potential. Rather than carrying on the surrealist nightmare that is the majority of “Backrooms,” the final ten or so minutes of the film revert into a traditional horror flick, where the protagonist faces off against a horrific monster, which the final girl defeats, overcoming her terrifying and seemingly hopeless circumstances.
One of the greatest strengths of “Backrooms” was its subversion of traditional horror ideas, instead providing a more unnerving and thought-provoking take on the genre, and the fact that this approach is abandoned for the finale is saddening. However, the ending’s saving grace is that it does manage to satisfyingly tie up the film’s narrative, and the final shot of Mary’s childhood home being copied repeatedly by the Backrooms brings the film’s unique approach back to the forefront.
“Backrooms” is a cleanly-executed surreal horror film which makes the oddities of the Backrooms accessible to the widest audience yet, maintaining enough mystery to stir intrigue and giving just enough to satisfy while remaining a relatively airtight plot. The ending may have dropped the ball, but despite this, “Backrooms” still earns an eight out of ten.
