Have you ever seen something ostensibly normal – say, three shopping carts in the middle of an abandoned parking lot, or an empty, kitschy furniture store – and stared at it just a little too long? Long enough that the banality of it all suddenly becomes sinister, or the layout suddenly looks slightly off? In 2019, an anonymous user on 4chan gave name to the spaces that emit that uncanny feeling – the Backrooms.
As an idea, the Backrooms originated as creepypasta – a term for online horror stories that proliferate across the internet and become legend. The idea was that somewhere in an alternate dimension existed an endless array of carpeted, vomitous yellow hallways that, if you weren’t careful, you might find yourself lost in. In 2022, YouTuber Kane Parsons came into the mix, starting a web series that eventually became the inspiration for the new film “Backrooms,” directed by Parsons and written by Will Soodik. The film certainly capitalizes on the disquieting nature of the original post and the series that followed. But, it also begs the question on whether or not one unsettling idea merits an entire movie.
For its first hour or so, Parsons pushes forward the aesthetic and ideas that makes the web series so captivatingly haunting, moving past a focus on spatial horror and attempting to take that same sense of wrongness and apply it to the characters at the center of the film. That idea works on paper, but as “Backrooms” plods on, it loses what original spark it had in the fog of thin characterization and a muddled third act.
The wrongness that pervades the idea of the Backrooms is captured in the film’s main character, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) – a failed architect-turned-furniture-store-owner who has spent the last several months on a resentful downward spiral after his wife left him. His days are spent managing an empty store, making laughably bad commercials in an attempt to entice customers to said empty store, or dealing with the warehouse’s host of electrical problems – which leads him to discover the existence of a seemingly endless set of muddled yellow hallways and rooms. When Clark disappears, his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve) takes it upon herself to find him.
“Backrooms” is at its best in its first hour, particularly when it’s playing with the visuals of the web series. Found footage is a big part of that visual language – the cold open, which plays out as video camera footage of what appears to be a scientific expedition into the rooms, is terrifying. But Clark’s first intentional mission into the Backrooms, with the help of his manager Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett), is the real calling card of the film, each layer of hell they descend to more warped than the last.
In having a larger format to play with, Parsons and production designer Danny Vermette can truly weaponize the unnerving nature of perspective and expectation, throwing what we know about spatial limitation out the window. In one scene as Clark runs away from whatever entity inhabits the Backrooms, he runs to a door at the far end of a crooked hallway. As he gets closer to the door, however, he realizes it wasn’t that far away at all – just smaller than expected. It’s like he’s stuck in a urine-colored Willy Wonka-type hell, soundtracked by buzzing fluorescent lights instead of Oompa Loompas.
As Clark descends deeper into the Backrooms – and again, as Mary comes to find him – the idea of iteration separates itself as something that Parsons and Soodik are clearly interested in. Clark best represents this idea (although Ejiofor draws a lot of emotional complexity out of a fairly broadly drawn character). Clark is resentful and rageful, looking for reasons to blame anyone else but himself for the ways in which he feels like a failure. In an early therapy scene where Mary points out how alone Clark is, he says it’s probably better that way, as he tends to hurt people.
“It’s just the way I’m wired,” he says, and you can feel the tightness in that statement, the attempt to convince himself that it really is just his nature – nothing to be done. As more mysteries about the Backrooms become clear, it’s easy to see why the place might hold some power over Clark. It’s a place that justifies his wrongness, that justifies the feeling he gets when he looks in the mirror that there is something false behind his eyes. It’s a place where pain isn’t real, so he can’t be the cause of it.
However, that idea of iteration falls apart as the movie swings further away from Clark and more towards Mary – not just character-wise, but structurally as well. One of Mary’s therapy talking points is the idea that people often get stuck in loops, cycles of which they can’t break out of. That’s thematically sound with the visual nature of the Backrooms, but, as Mary kicks off the last act of the film by stepping up to the same entrance to the rooms as Clark did, has the same reaction to her entry into an extra-dimensional space, the cycles of the film start to feel just a little bit too familiar.
As “Backrooms” sets off on Mary’s quest to find Clark, it loses forward momentum. Clark’s internal struggles mirror his venture into the space, but – while Reinsve deftly captures the trippiness of the terror her character is feeling – Mary is too thinly drawn to carry the same weight. Throughout the film, we get snippets of a relationship with her mentally ill mother that makes for a few mesmerizing visual moments, but warrant more interrogation if they’re meant to give us any insight into Mary’s journey through the Backrooms. Instead, we follow her through an endless maze of horror, unsure of her connection to the loops she’s forced into.
“Backrooms” opens in theaters this weekend.
