I’d be lying if I said I was an aficianado of the whole creepypasta, liminal horror thing that has taken the Internet by storm. But I do know a little about 20-year-old director Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, which became a viral sensation web series seen by millions. This particular subgenre is more about tension, vibes, unease, and a disturbing mythology than scares that send you leaping from the seat. As such, the transition from YouTube to feature-length movie wasn’t a certainty to work. The bar to entertain a crowd of theater goers is different than someone sitting at their computer or watching from a tablet. But Parsons, showing the maturity of a filmmaker well beyond his young age, has made a deeply unsettling film that could be the start of a booming franchise.
The cast is small, but when you’ve got actors the caliber of Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, it doesn’t need to be more than that. Set in 1990, Backrooms stars Ejofor as Clark, a lonely failed architect who owns a discount furniture store that is now also failing. His attempts to spark business aren’t just disastrous, they’re humiliating, with Clark dressing himself up as a pirate for cheap, humiliating commercial spots. While he won’t admit it to himself, Clark is a functional alcoholic who has lost his family and basically lives out of the store. One day, Clark stumbles through a false wall and into a seemingly endless maze of rooms. Imagine an infinite amount of office space, bathed in ugly yellow paint and mind-numbing flourescent light. Each room is creepier than the next, with stairs and doors leading to nowhere, weird pools of water, and perhaps even a monster lurking in the shadows. It’s like some broken reflection of Clark’s reality, but the backrooms’ true nature is itself a mystery.
Reinsve enters the picture as Clark’s therapist, Mary, who is struggling to pull him out of a depressive spiral. Nothing seems to work, as Clark is more interested in justifying his anger than curing himself of it. Mary, with not much going on herself, gets deeply invested in Clark’s situation, which leads her into the backrooms, as well.
Parsons, working alongside writer Will Soodik, has taken the enigmatic core that worked so well online, and added emotional depth that wasn’t there before. Clark is a man who has been consumed by the things he has lost; his career, his family, his sense of self. He is so overwhelmed by grief that he now exists in an isolating world of chaos. One could surmise that the backrooms are a reflection of his struggles, misery given tangible form.
Or perhaps the backrooms are just some parallel dimension that exists outside of our reality, and is populated by twisted, mutated freaks. Hey, who can say? That’s part of the fun of Backrooms, figuring things out for yourself.
Parsons teases a larger mythos that could be the building blocks of future sequels. The backrooms show signs of having been in existence long before Clark stumbled into them. Mark Duplass cameos as someone who has been studying them, and clearly knows more than what we are ever privy to. There’s so much more to be discovered, but Parsons keeps answers tantalizingly out of reach.
Backrooms is an impressive debut feature, setting Parsons up as a director to keep an eye on, similar to Zach Cregger. There’s a reason why horror maestros James Wan and Oz Perkins are aboard as producers, because they already see him as a contemporary and an equal. The only complaints I have is that it’s a bit too slow, and with the architecture looking pretty much the same throughout, the film can feel a little stilted. But my guess is that Backrooms is going to inspire many people to seek out similar vibe-heavy horrors, and to add Parsons to their list of genre filmmakers whose work will be unmissable.
A24 releases Backrooms in theaters on May 29th.
