I Came to Backrooms Completely Blind
Full disclosure: I came to Backrooms as blind as you possible could. Prior to the lights dimming and the big screen illuminating, I knew absolutely nothing about YouTube series, the creepypasta movement, or anything that has to do with the pre-existing lore. All I knew was that it was based on a popular internet series and the director was a 20 year old child. This is an important distinction to make early before we dive into Backrooms. While prior knowledge isn’t necessary to enjoy the film, having some certainly changes how the film is received overall and vastly changes what worked and what didn’t.
I’m inclined to believe that this was the better way to experience Backrooms, as you can feel the young, first time director Kane Parsons working hard to draw from his original ideas and expand them for a more cinematic format. And for his first foray into Hollywood, I’d argue Parsons gets a lot more right than wrong, drawing inspirations from the greats and displaying promising visual flare. Backrooms is visually unnerving yet narrative clunky, its festering production design and surrealist descent into the liminal unknown almost making up for its underdeveloped characters and deeply flawed 3rd act.
What Exactly IS The Backrooms?
Written by Will Soodik and directed by Kane Parsons (making his directorial debut) Backrooms follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) a depressed, divorced, failed architect alcoholic furniture store owner stuck in a rut. Easily angered and always the victim, he has regularly scheduled therapy visits with Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) who has her own demons she’s wrestling with. Clark discovers a hidden doorway in the back of his store that seems to lead to another dimension, a seemingly endless maze of liminal spaces and rooms that feel created from half remembered structures. Clark is excited about this discovery at first, but it soon becomes clear that something isn’t right and something may be in the rooms with him. After he goes missing, Mary enters the backrooms to find him and unravel this unbelievable mystery.
I don’t know that I would call Backrooms a horror movie. It’s unsettling and nightmare inducing, the endless maze of empty halls and half made rooms sent a chill down my spine and rewired my brain, crawling under my skin and quite literally kept me up at night. But those visceral reactions stem more from the things it does outside of the genre rather than the horror tropes that would classify it as such. Backrooms is more of a slow burn, surrealist, liminal thriller than an outright scare fest.
Light on Scares But Visually Terrifying
The film is suprisingly light on scares in the conventional sense, but the things that work to haunt you left my subconscious wandering into the liminal spaces of sleeping imagery. That’s a huge compliment from me, as films typically don’t sit that deep in the recesses of my mind and force me to continually revisit its most uncomfortable moments. I left the theater in a haze and haven’t truly come out of it yet. Backrooms is at its most frightening when it sits in the unexplainable, when it traps you in the ever expanding unknown dimension with a Kubrickian approach of finding terror in an almost empty void.
The Shining is all over Backrooms, a descent into madness amid the isolation of open, endless space and the corruption of nothing but time and your own intrusive thoughts. The ugly yellow hue that permeates the entire screen is – like the backrooms in the film itself – alluring at first, but the longer you sit it in them the more uncomfortable you feel. What was once an amazing discovery transforms into a constant sense of dread, that indescribable feeling we get when we just KNOW something isn’t right but don’t know how to find the answers for whatever is wrong. It is the true strength of Backrooms and Parsons’ direction and ideas. Turns out practical production design and minimalist maximalism is all you need to make an effective film.
Backrooms Has a Major 3rd Act Problem
While his inventive visuals and thematic influences work tremendously, Kane’s youthful inexperience reels its ugly head when it comes to fleshing out a feature length story. Though Ejiofor and Reinsve give it their all – they’re both quite excellent and give really strong performances – Backrooms suffers from clunky connective tissue that seek to tie it all together but ultimately falls apart in the end. It’s a film with a major 3rd act problem, one that really fumbles the bag and took me out of the transfixed state the first 2 acts locked me into. Shit gets real weird real fast, and while I’m not against going for broke, it does have to actually have some substance behind it to work.
Backrooms tries to meld the lore and scattered easter eggs throughout into a satisfying conclusion for both fans of the series and people like me coming in blind. Unfortunately, Parsons IS 20 years old, and no amount of talent can make up for the fact that he simply hasn’t lived through enough to understand adulthood. Backrooms approaches its characters like a kid who took Philosophy 101 and then believes they understand everything about how the world works.
Great Performances Can’t Overcome Poorly Written Characters
Parsons knows that his Backrooms characters have to be interesting, but he doesn’t really know what grown ups actually do or feel, then insists with unearned confidence that he knows all there is to know about the experience. This really comes to head in the film’s final 30 minutes, in which the characters make some inexplicable decisions and collide with the attempt to inject the lore into it all.
Pretty much anytime spent outside of the rooms is a slog, and as much as I adore both performers their character and dialogue borders on insufferable. Even for the horror genre, these people are dumb and underdeveloped. Sadly great actors and unforgettable visual aesthetic can’t hide these shortcomings forever. It’s a major flaw but it’s not a fatal one, the strength of Backrooms more than overcoming them most of the time. Given everything we know about it – the internet beginnings, the young first time director, the difficulty of medium transfer – that fact that Backrooms is successful at all is a miracle.
Final Thoughts
Backrooms is far from perfect, and is sure to fall victim to the younger generation hype machine. The visuals may not be enough for everyone, and the flaws are glaring enough to leave some viewers disappointed or worse, downright angry. But for me, Backrooms lives in an untapped space of expanding mindshare and hope for the future. If this is where movies are headed and these are the young minds that will shape it, then go ahead and give me 1000 Backrooms.
I am not easily rattled, yet Backrooms dug its way into mind in ways very films have before. I need my sleep and Backrooms disrupted it, and that’s about the highest complete I can pay to a deeply flawed but deeply effective film.
Also, not the point but anyone pushing ghost director rumors either didn’t watch the film or simply don’t know how to watch movies. The entire time I was watching Backrooms I kept thinking to myself “ya, this was definitely directed by a 20 year old” and I mean that both as a compliment and a detriment in equal measure.
I know it’s where Backrooms was born, but some of you need to get off the internet.
