Exploring the Terrifying World of "Backrooms"

There is something inherently creepy about liminal spaces—those long, eerily bland, artificially illuminated passages that exist in so much modern architecture. Anyone that’s found themselves unexpectedly alone in one of these halls in an airport, mall, office building, or other communal structure has probably felt a twinge of unease upon entering it, as though something is just a little off and a threat could be lurking behind any corner or unmarked door. It’s this discomfort that young director Kane Parsons tapped into so effectively in his The Backrooms shorts on YouTube and that he expands upon equally successfully in his feature debut Backrooms.

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) has been reduced to sleeping in his discount furniture store after a falling out with his wife. In sessions with his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) we learn that his latent anger issues may be what lead to the breakup, but it’s doubtful that anything can really be done to salvage the relationship.

Electrical anomalies in the store lead him to investigate the breaker box in the basement one night, where he notices light coming through a very narrow slit in a wall. Upon closer inspection he discovers that he can phase right through it, ending up in a seemingly endless labyrinth of blandly minimalist, corporate-like hallways and rooms.

He tells Mary about it at their next session, even showing her a crude map he made of the portions he explored, but she is understandably skeptical. Determined to prove her wrong, he enlists his employees Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and Bobby (Finn Bennett) to help document the strange facility on Bobby’s camcorder. When Mary later receives a strange phone call from Clark, she goes to the store to check in on him and also winds up entering the maze. But they are not alone inside it, as a mysterious and deadly being seems to be stalking them.

By using off-kilter arrangements of otherwise anodyne objects, Parsons, his production designer Danny Vermette, and sound designer Eugenio Battaglia have crafted a world that is about as close to a manifestation of an actual nightmare as any movie has ever gotten. Finding yourself in an inoffensive and vaguely familiar space populated with items from your own memories where everything is wrong in varying ways and a large threat appears to be hunting you is a truly terrifying prospect and it is executed brilliantly here, generating a great deal of suspense and unease.

Writer Will Soodik (Homeland, Westworld, Ash vs. Evil Dead) has done a good job at pulling a story out of Parsons’ relatively plotless YouTube shorts. It isn’t the most thematically rich or eventful movie ever made, but he provides us with enough material to pull us along as the characters wander the halls. Largely all any of them are required to do is be frightened, which they all handle well enough, though Ejiofor is given a bit more to work with as his already fragile mental state is further thrown out of whack by his discoveries and he really stands out as a result.

The movie will likely be a bit too minimalistic for some, and aside from some slight gestures towards the ways our pasts can come back to haunt us there aren’t really any grand thematic statements to be found here. For many though, Backrooms is likely to go down as one of the more genuinely frightening movies of the year, and even those who don’t fully vibe with it will still find it hard to shake from their thoughts. Uniquely intriguing, this is a remarkably assured first film, and at only 20 years old, Kane Parsons has proved himself to be one of the most promising new filmmakers working today. ★★★★½