Twenty-year-old Kane Parsons makes his directorial debut with Backrooms, the film adaptation of his unsettling YouTube series.
This one details the eerie otherworld of the Backrooms – an endless expanse of twisting, warped corridors that one can accidentally fall into as easily as tripping over a paving stone in the street.
‘There are doors opening everywhere. We don’t know why or what’s connecting them – they just keep happening.’
Chiwetel Ejiofor is Clark, a struggling alcoholic cast out by his wife, who unwittingly steps away from our world and into the Backrooms while investigating disturbances in the basement of his failing furniture store. He soon finds himself hopelessly lost somewhere in that maze of identical corridors – each one buzzing with the sickly yellow hue of a pale fluorescent light. Any chance of an escape back to the real world lies in the hands of his shrink, Dr. Mary Kline (Sentimental Value star Renate Reinsve) who may well have issues in her own past worth working through.
The Backrooms as a concept are not entirely Parsons’ own – they date back to the early 2010s, where a strangely liminal photograph was passed around online of a HobbyTown store completely emptied during a renovation. With the place looking so empty, void of anything of note bar the almost pungently yellow tone of the image, the internet had something of a field day concocting all sorts of horror stories (‘creepypastas’ if you’re really in the know) about it – speculating on its origin and its true nature.
Said image went truly public in a 2019 thread, with liminal spaces subsequently becoming a major talking point in the internet’s zeitgeist during the Pandemic, when the streets all felt like ghost towns.
I, for one, find them really interesting as a concept. Although I’ve never properly delved into Parsons’ ongoing YouTube series in its entirety (having started in 2022, the full series now spans 24 episodes), this was my most anticipated release of the month, given A24’s eagerness to put a young, promising creative at the helm of his own adaptation rather than pushing him out in favour of a studio hand.
James Wan (Saw, Insidious) and Osgood Perkins (Longlegs) serve as producers here to guide Parsons on his way, and there’s been a disappointing sniffiness in some of the critical conversation around Backrooms, with some casting doubt as to whether this young director really did have free rein of the project. I don’t think there’s any merit to that beyond an attempt at diminishing the man’s achievement: Backrooms, to my eyes, seems completely in keeping with what I’ve seen of Parsons’ work on the subject.
As I mentioned in my Obsession review (Curry Barker’s new horror trip seeing significant box office returns, toppling The Mandalorian and Grogu on last week’s US chart), we seem to be in the midst of a changing of the guard, with new talent coming in from YouTube and other internet pipelines. A child of the 2000s, Parsons has a clear understanding of his online heritage, scattering easter eggs all through the Backrooms for keen-eyed viewers to find.
I spotted a musical choice in a hospital sequence that felt as close to a direct rendition of A1’s ‘It’s just a burning memory’ as legally possible. The song went viral alongside a slew of liminal content – the Backrooms included – so to go without a nod to it somewhere in here would have been a shame. Fantastically, its memorable sting is really a sample of a 1930s track from old crooner Al Bowlly, whose work was featured in the soundtrack for The Shining. Elsewhere, the specific framing of a dining room scene seemed to nod to David B. Earle’s early-internet short ‘Dining Room or There Is Nothing’, a reversed video of a pale-faced woman set to discordant piano notes.
The film really soars when it plays closest to its source material. There’s a reason that the online series has proved so popular, and the sequences that manage to find a way to incorporate the original’s analog horror, found footage visual style as a framing device sell the warped weirdness of each room. Set in the summer of 1990, Backrooms arms Clark not with a gun or a knife but with a grainy, cracking camcorder that creates an unnerving yet interesting disconnect between his physical experience and what we as the audience are seeing.
In fact, the idea of looking at the world from behind frosted glass (almost like you’re sitting in the backseat while you move through life on autopilot) plays a far more significant role in the story than you’d expect. It’s also far more distressing to try and figure out quite what you’re looking at when your eyes are battling against the wobbly, wavy image of an older camera – something horror movies have been using to their advantage since a time before even The Blair Witch Project. One moment in particular pays mind to the camera as a physical object within the Backrooms, too, to creepy effect.
While those scenes are liminal space dynamite, they’re still in the minority – limited, really, to one short sequence. That feels like something of a missed opportunity in a film that seemed, to all the world, poised to eschew the wide, omniscient typical camera and embrace its origins fully with a third act seen entirely through the lens of Clark’s own camcorder. The wider camera does convey a sense of dead space, which is odd in its own right. When it creeps behind Clark as he follows the quiet sound of a mysterious recording speaking to him in a multitude of foreign languages, the atmosphere is potent, but the hyper-detailed digital camera gives the set a cheap looking quality that feels out of place in a big-screen adaptation, even on an A24 budget.
The Backrooms are supposed to look naff and off-putting, but while I appreciate the efforts made to create a gigantic physical set of the Rooms big enough to get lost in, Parsons’ use of the rendering tool Blender when creating environments for the series allowed him to give the place a grunginess that feels absent in this film’s more washed out aesthetic. Again, when this project was announced, I had hopes that Parsons would take the expanded scope and create some truly memorable landscapes to torment his characters (and us) with – completely upside-down rooms or Escher-esque staircases – but outside of one fantastically cavernous room in the final act, that daring spirit just isn’t there. This restraint is a feature, not a bug – Parsons explicitly said he wanted to underplay things so as not to run away with himself – but I think he could have trusted himself to crank things up slightly without completely spilling over, especially with such a competent support network behind him.
Bar that lack of truly cinematic scope, the film’s only real issue stems from its story, specifically the arcs of its two central characters. I’ve only seen the earlier Backrooms videos, but their near-silent found footage experiences don’t really lend themselves to a film narrative – they’re far more about seating the viewer in that world; the protagonists audience surrogates to the nth degree.
Writer Will Soodik has approached fleshing out the source material through the lens of a man’s deteriorating psyche – the interplay between therapist and patient; Mary and Clark – which is very fitting given the horror context. I didn’t entirely buy that journey, though, not least because we seem to skip over some crucial beats. We see Clark’s first trip into the Backrooms and when we next see him enter, he’s apparently been going in for at least a week and has put together a whole map of the place – I wanted to see him grow that expertise over time, because as it stands, his enlightenment seems to occur overnight. Ejiofor and Reinsve aren’t to be blamed, though – they commit to everything that’s asked of them here, trying hard to paper over the weaker details. Certain elements of the third act also felt rushed, which is a shame given how character-focused it is, and the film ultimately ends on an a rather abrupt note that feels more unsatisfying than enigmatic.
I’ve seen some complaints about how little of the film’s world Soodik and Parsons seem to want to explain to us, but if anything, I actually think that the story dissects the Backrooms more than I would have liked it to. We don’t learn about its origin, thankfully (personally, I hope we never do – it’s far more fun to speculate) but the film’s characters, near the end, approach them from a scientific and logical angle that, to my ears, felt far too similar to the way Stranger Things handled its own Upside Down, especially given the pair’s commonality of a similarly retro aesthetic.
Ultimately, Backrooms is a sufficiently creepy debut outing for Parsons, and I can see this being the first of many trips into the film’s titular void. I’ll happily sit in for another dive into this world as there’s promise here, but I hope the second instalment irons out the creases in whatever plot it chooses to take on and that Parsons is encouraged to go to wilder and more experimental places worthy of a setting as strange as this one.
BBFC: Rated 15 for strong language, violence, injury detail, horror.
Backrooms is in cinemas now.
