REVIEW: ‘Backrooms’ Showcases Huge Potential Even When It Falters

Backrooms is another A24-produced debut film from a YouTuber, and it’s safe to say that the studio has cracked the code on the next generation of filmmakers. Directed by Kane Parsons and written by Will Soodik, the film utilizes a small cast and a set that feels infinite to examine a liminal space that shouldn’t exist. 

Building on Parsons’s previous web series, the film’s inspiration began as a creepypasta posted on 4chan’s paranormal board. Like many creepypastas before and after it, it was YouTube creators who kept it alive and gave it form, and now, with a $10 million budget and A24 backing, Parsons has brought it to life on-screen. 

A debut feature film, Backrooms, is more tense than horrific, at least in the beginning. Parsons banks on your understanding of the world to play with your expectations and scratch the part of your brain that repeatedly tries to understand things that are slightly off, not quite right, even if you never can.

Backrooms delivers a tense, unsettling character study. 

In the film, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a furniture store owner. He’s an alcoholic, separated from his wife, and resentful of losing his dream of being an architect. To heal, he receives regular therapy from Dr. Mary Kline(Renate Reinsve), a woman holding her own trauma and secrets. 

Kicked out of his house, Clark lives in his store, sleeping on the furniture he would sell if a customer ever came in. He lives a sad life, his inability to move on clear in his being stuck in the store. In a drunken stupor, he discovers a dimension of seemingly endless liminal spaces accessed from the store’s basement. With yellow wallpaper, the office-like rooms grow increasingly large in scope, only everything is just slightly off from how we know it to be. 

Words are backward, doors are missing handles, are on the ceiling, or lead to nowhere at all. And in the backrooms of the furniture store, something dangerous lurks. As Clark explores the backrooms, he becomes both clearer in his drive but also increasingly deranged, leaving his therapist to pick up the pieces. 

Chiwetel Ejiofor delivers a superb and dynamic performance as the conflicted Clark. 

Most people use the word “liminal” with very little understanding of the weight that it carries. However, Parsons understands it’s meaning. More importantly, through Clark, we see a man rotting in it. For him, he was married, he was loved, he was an architect, and now he’s in this big furniture store, alone, drunk, and just trying to get by. He is, by every definition, at a turning point in his life; all he has to do is pick a direction to go towards. 

Instead, he’s paralyzed, unable to take responsibility and equally scared to live a life that is so far detached from the one that he saw for himself (and had) that he just rots in the in-between. Choosing control and comfort at the expense of living. 

For his part as Clark, Chiwetel Ejiofor showcases not only his ability to deliver lines with the kind of emotion that seeps into your pores from the screen, but also how to change on a dime. Oscillating between self-assured and in-charge to rage-filled and pathetic, and then to an eerie kind of calm. His performance, stripped back from layers of effects work and big-budget blockbusters, is intimate. 

Clark is both someone you feel sorry for and someone you hate and fear. And that is because he is rotting, his mind tipping over itself, rationalizing his decisions and the insanity that he has accepted as reality in the backrooms. 

Kane Parsons understands how to use the “liminal” setting to great effect.

Aside from Ejiofor’s performance, Backrooms is a visual marvel. Not because it’s extravagant or overwrought, but because the set designs feel grimy and grounded even in their otherworldly nature. With the kind of world that serves as the setting and ultimately the primary character of the film, the maze-like structure shows a piece of our reality, but wrong,  only works because it rides the fine line between gross and fantastical. It burrows itself in wonder but never fully tips into something beautiful. Instead, it’s fragmented, and in its inaccuracies, we find the horror. 

There is something truly unsettling with things that aren’t in proportion, that are backward, that are just off by a slight margin, that you can still tell what it is meant to be. Our brain compensates for many of those elements. It’s why we can read a sentence with many grammatical inaccuracies and still walk away knowing the message it conveys. But with physical objects, as the errors increase, the pit in your stomach grows larger and larger until it’s almost unbearable. 

Backrooms captures that build-up; the deeper we go, the closer the rooms get to real, and all of that feels immensely wrong, so the dread creeps in. While Ejiofor and Reinsve anchor the cast, the backrooms themselves is the protagonist of this story, eating away at those inside it, and the audience hand in hand. 

Backrooms is a sure-fire hit until it fails to stick the landing. 

Still, for all of the masterful work that Parsons has put into Backrooms, the ending erases much of the tension that has built up over the course of the first 95-ish minutes. The tonal shift isn’t only jarring but runs counter to everything we have just spent so much time being unsettled by. Backrooms is at its best when it puts you on the edge of the uncanny valley, looking directly into the abyss with the fear that Parsons will push you into it. 

However, in the film’s final moments, we’re jerked away from it, safely pulled aside, and given some kind of answers to everything we just saw. While Parsons and Soodik leave breadcrumbs for the ending’s reveal, the uncertainty they built in their audience fueled their story. Clark’s descent into madness is so well acted and scripted that the sudden jolt of reality betrays everything, cheapening everything that came before and ultimately squandering the potential that Mark Duplass has in a film as unnerving as this. 

With the original story for Backrooms originating as a creepypasta, it’s no surprise that sticking the landing was difficult. More often than not, the fear is driven by creepypasta storytelling, by what isn’t said and what is left unanswered, allowing users to build on the original, either by posting or personally. 

Despite ending on a sour note, Backrooms highlights immense promise with Parsons’s vision. 

For Backrooms, the original served as a play on liminal spaces, with nothing more than the placement of an infinite, yellow-wallpapered, maze-like dimension. And like many creepypastas, Parsons has expanded it, grabbed onto the core bits, and created his own story. However, as with any liminal space, what comes out at the end is far different than what entered. 

While the ending is difficult to understand in terms of its execution, its message is clear. It serves as an endpoint, the new part of life after the backrooms. And ultimately, it allows one of our characters to do so, infinitely changed. Still, it serves as a reminder that creepypasta adaptations can fail, even if his vision and recreation of that 4chan paranormal board post will be definitive for the story from this point on. 

Backrooms may not be close to my favorite horror film of the year, but it is far more than just a solid debut. While the ending soured much of the time in my theater, Parsons’s vision of insanity and exploration of liminal spaces demonstrates a mind destined for the great and bizarre. Parsons’s career is just beginning in Hollywood, and with a little refinement, Backrooms shows that we will be singing the praises of Kane Parsons’s work for quite some time. 

Backrooms is playing in theaters nationwide.