Backrooms [is] an absolute feast for horror fans, people who grew up with the internet, as well as anyone who’s ever been in a mall which was just about to close down and made you feel like you were the last person left on Earth.
Written by Kenza Bouhnass Parra
20-year-old director Kane Parsons has entered the industry with a big bang through his first feature, Backrooms, currently playing in theatres worldwide. The film, now in its third week on the big screen, has passed the $250M mark worldwide with a $300M locked; making it A24's highest-grossing film ever at the domestic as well as the global box office.
Backrooms is based on an original internet concept that emanated in 2019 from an eerie picture of an empty furniture store, in renovations, with yellow wallpaper. The concept, further developed by internet users through a discussion thread, became an entire universe, comprised of floors and rooms’ levels, interconnected places, roaming entities, and entrances to our real world. In 2022, Kane Parsons, known as an American YouTuber at the time, created a 24-episode series called Backrooms, exploring and expanding on that world and bringing it into the mainstream.
The film adaptation is derived directly from his own series, with Parsons directing a screenplay written by Will Soodick. In the film, we follow Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), owner of a furniture store, and his therapist (Renate Reinsve), who stumble upon one of the passages to the backrooms in the basement of the said furniture store and start exploring them. It is a concise premise, but a strength for a film that could have easily gotten lost in the overwhelming lore that has been building up for years about this particular luminal space. The backrooms are a character in themselves, a never-ending breathing place where each room reveals another trait of its personality.
The production design is the absolute standout of the film, with more than 30,000 square feet of sets built across four sound stages, with just as much wallpaper and carpet. Both fitting the original concept, all the way back to the picture, and therefore conveying with great success the eerie and unsettling atmosphere as soon as one step is taken into the backrooms. The viewers are constantly inhabited by the feeling that "something is not right," with room dimensions or alignments not being respected, communicating doors not following our real-life logic, reversed writings on some objects, or even with said objects being half buried onto the floor. All details that leave you constantly on the edge, as you are aware that an unreality has been accessed. Still close enough to ours so that the audience forever tries to keep a sense of rationality by anchoring itself through aspects of this world that still have the same meanings as theirs, without success.
Unfortunately, Backrooms finds its weaker spot in its screenplay. The place in itself, being such a major occupying space, visually as well as narratively, the characters’ construction of Clark and his therapist, Mary, appears superficial in comparison. Each of them has a past to explain their choices for the first entry into the backrooms, but it is merely put there to act as the first motivation. When the film gets to its third act, the characters don’t hold enough depth anymore to motivate their actions, and seem to be only compliantly reacting to the external danger found in the backrooms, becoming passive in their own character. Ejiofor and Reinsve are incredible, finding force in the silences, building inner lives through observation, but it is unfortunately not enough to overcome the shortcomings of the script.
The narrative is at its strongest when the backrooms are being discovered and explored. The use of a point-of-view camera paired with the sound design of the person’s internal noise leads to a total immersion into the character’s experience, bringing the viewer into the luminal space with them. When the film switches from the universal and paralyzing fear of the unknown to a specific entity apparently responsible for all horrors happening in a never-ending space, and the characters do not hold enough steam to instill another kind of human and personal fear in the audience, it becomes apparent that the film has reached its narrative exploration.
But, despite the shortcomings of its screenplay, Backrooms remains an absolute feast for horror fans, people who grew up with the internet, as well as anyone who’s ever been in a mall which was just about to close down and made you feel like you were the last person left on Earth.
Now playing in cinemas across the globe!
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