Directed by Kane Parsons | Written by Parsons and Will Soodik | 110 min | ▲▲▲▲ | In Cinemas
It’s rare to go see a movie where when you step outside the screening room you immediately see the world in the frame of that movie.
When you come out of Backrooms everything looks a little… off. It’s like YouTube phenom Kane Parsons — who turns 21 on June 18 — he and his production designer Danny Vermette have trained the audience with their film to see the creeping oddities in commercial, industrial, and liminal spaces, especially when those spaces are a little tired or retro, needing a refresh — like nearly all the Cineplex Cinemas in this town.
And that’s the major achievement of this film, how it constructs a believable, entirely unnerving environment. Birthed from one of the weirder corners of the internet, it channels a little of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, maybe some of the Underneath from Stranger Things, a smidge of the clinical, sealed-off environment of Severance, the transitional coolth of Exit 8, and even a dash of the real-life urban repurposing of Secret Mall Apartment to create something genuinely original. The huge box office response on its first weekend suggests this picture is easing into the zeitgeist — from now on, every unsettling, empty urban space will be a backroom.
And while in its first two acts the film looks to be a classic, it does stumble a little in the final 20 minutes. It’s a little disappointing given the wildly impressive vibes of the set-up.
Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor, solid as always) is an architect running a suburban big-box furniture warehouse circa 1990. This place isn’t doing too well — you can tell because the cheap-looking stock is always pretty low in the sprawling openness of the sales floor. Clark makes one of those awful, shot-on-video commercials where he has to humiliate himself pretending to be a pirate to encourage sales — his assistant manager, Kat (Lukita Maxwell of Shrinking) and her boyfriend, Bobby (Finn Bennett), shoot it on a borrowed camera.
Clark is in a dark place. He sees a therapist — fairly progressive for a suburban guy in 1990 — to try and manage his problems. He admits he hurts people, he chases them away before they hurt him — but he also blames his wife for not understanding his work ethic. At some point in the recent past he was kicked out of his house and is now sleeping in a bed at the store, most nights drinking whiskey from the bottle and watching TV.
His therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), she has her own darkness — haunted by memories of her mother’s mental health challenges, she also seems very much alone in the rooms of her apartment.
In the basement of the furniture warehouse Clark discovers a place he struggles to describe, like his own psyche. Lit by yellow florescent ceiling lights, it’s a labyrinth of interconnected rooms, strangely abandoned with odd, surreal detritus, perhaps remnants of previous occupants, or something else much harder to explain. As we go along with Clark these spaces take on more of an MC Escher-like design, impossible architecture — as if we’re visiting the transubstantiating of someone’s subconscious. We also get the suggestion of a terrifying hidden presence — a monster of the id.
Clark tells his therapist about this space, but naturally she doesn’t believe him. He recruits Kat and Bobby to help him explore further — we see their collective time in the backrooms only through the lens of the antique video camera, which is a more conventional horror approach but still plenty unnerving. Clark disappears and Mary comes looking for him.
All of this is fascinating, chilling, and unexpected. It’s when we finally get a few answers about what is down there — partly coinciding with the arrival of a guy named Phil (Mark Duplass) — is when the analogy is stripped away and the mysterious slips into the obvious. The film suggests some ideas around online nostalgia, repression, and plays with the fear of generative AI, but maybe cleaves a little too closely to ambiguity — that is, not actually be about something definitive. It also gets a little goofy — I was happy to note the monster wasn’t some kind of typical CGI creation, but only those with a phobia of papier-mâché will find it later in their nightmares.
Those endless, yellow rooms, though? I still haven’t shaken the deep and abiding sense of creep they gave me. See it for those rooms, and for a guided tour into the collective subconscious.
