Review: Descend into the Hell of the Backrooms

"If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you."

That’s the short story that created the backrooms. Inspired by the image of an empty hobby shop mid-renovation, a 4chan thread dedicated to creepypasta asked users to "post disquieting images that just felt off." Soon thereafter, a new form of internet horror was born. Soon, everyone contributed their own takes to the backrooms, making videos and games and defining the terror of so-called liminal spaces. And now, it's a film courtesy of A24 and a 20-year-old director who got his start making short films in Blender. If this is the future of cinema, it's a pretty good one.

Directed by Kane Parsons, Backrooms stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a furniture store owner who is not coping well with his recent divorce and alcohol issues. His therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), tries to get him to confront his past errors and move on to a lighter, brighter future. But he's got another problem to deal with. The lights keep flickering in his store for seemingly no reason. The distribution board has irregular switches that connect to nothing. And in the basement, he notices a slit in the wall that passes into a seemingly endless maze of rooms. They seem fine, until they're not.

The backrooms lore has always been scary to me. Sure, not every video I’ve seen has freaked me out – such is the irregularity of community-based storytelling – but the basic ideas behind the mythos really tap into my psyche. I’m very affected by stories where the apparently mundane slowly reveals itself to be almost cosmically terrifying. I was curious as to how Parsons, whose web series forms the foundations of this adaptation, would give structural and thematic heft to what is largely an aesthetic-driven concept. You can get away with a lot of weird visuals in a 10-minute short, but a movie needs more. Mercifully, he and screenwriter Will Soodik managed to effectively thread that needle.

You don’t need prior knowledge of the creepypasta to appreciate Backrooms, although Parsons has definitely put in an Easter egg or two for those of us who watched his prior work. Set in the early ‘90s, the film benefits from a more retro aesthetic and the limitations of a pre-digital time. Like his shorts, there are a few scenes shot from a first-person camcorder perspective, and nobody can call from a mobile phone to fix all the issues. Mercifully, it’s short on jump scares, preferring to sink into the dreamlike, claustrophobic mood its setting evokes. As a horror fan who is also a massive chicken, I was definitely on edge for most of the running time, psyching myself up for something horrendous to be around the next corner.

The sickly yellow walls, the flickering neon lights, and the dingy floors conjures up memories of suffocating corporate workspaces and that are familiar to us all and take very little effort to curdle into something unnerving. The first thing Clark sees when he stumbles through the wall into the backrooms is a nest of furniture, deformed and blended together as though this pile of wood had been glued together by a madman. It shouldn’t be so queasy to look at and yet it is. Every new room seems to have something revealing a similar kind of degradation: stop signs spelled incorrectly, couches half-sunken into the floors, wooden telephone poles at unnatural angles. It’s disorienting to watch, stomach-churning even.

The thing about a lot of backrooms stuff is that it ends the same way: oops, there’s a monster, and it’s usually a meme-based thing because creepypasta is internet storytelling and wears its video game influences on its sleeve. Those are always the least satisfying parts of the lore to me, in part because I don’t feel any real weight to the reveals. Granted, many of these videos are driven by visuals and mood more than theme, and you have to accommodate for that. Parsons, savvily, makes his backrooms about something, or really, a lot of things.

It’s about a midlife crisis, the fickleness of memory, the trauma of grief, the unreliability of our tangible lives, and the corporate terror of almighty conglomerates. It’s not a movie that lectures the audience on any of this or offers exposition dumps to explain its ideas (this is, delightfully, a film that almost entirely avoids the end-of-movie Psycho-esque breakdown of what we’ve just seen.) I was reminded a lot of David Lynch, of Annihilation, of House of Leaves, and Nathan Fielder: stories of obsession that encourage you to become as consumed by its questions as the characters. What is it like to fall into a world where you are confronted by the undeniable terror of your own existence, of a plain where you thought you knew the rules but now they’re something totally different?

Backrooms got to me. It captured all of the elements of the creepypasta that unnerve me and added an emotional resonance that fleshed out the lore in a way I hadn't seen coming. Parsons is a fully-formed talent who knows what he's doing. I'm sure A24 is going to milk this for sequels since it's expected to be a far bigger hit than they'd initially anticipated. While I sort of want to let the mystery be, I can't deny that I crave more of the backrooms. Like its characters, for better or worse, I want to see how deep this truly goes.

Backrooms is in theatres now.