What would you do if you found a hole in reality in your basement that led to an endless, hostile realm that could probably be best described as a conference centre meets literal Hell? If you’re a sensible person, you’d leave it alone forever, but if you’re a manic divorcee looking for purpose like Backrooms protagonist Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), you might enter it in a search for meaning. The debut from the frighteningly young director (just 20) Kane Parsons, Backrooms is a triumphantly eerie mix of Gen Z innovation and the oldest trope in horror – characters with the survival instincts of a melon. The end result is gloriously frightening, a profoundly promising first feature from a kid not even at university graduation age.
Expanding on the YouTube sensation made by Parsons himself as a teenager, Backrooms leans into the internet’s fascination with ‘liminal spaces’, the horror of the quiet and empty and impersonal. Clark is the owner of a failing discount furniture store in 1990s California (as with the original videos, VHS aesthetics are core to Backrooms), sleeping on the beds on his own showroom floor after being kicked out by his wife, and in the basement of which he finds a wall he can walk right through, into the endless space of The Backrooms.
He’s soon enough followed by his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve), fuelled by traumas of her own, but this is not a space built for human beings. Even before *something* (and it’s a large, lumbering something) starts crashing around, the Backrooms are terrifying, every room filled with the familiar yet entirely unsuited to actual habitation. There are tiny, inaccessible doors, stairs that lead nowhere, and big piles of clothes and furniture for absolutely no-one. As a feat of set building and world design, it’s a gobsmacking masterclass, fascinating enough that you never want to look away, but also just *wrong* enough that looking at it gives you a pit in your stomach.
Parsons is just as confident with his camerawork as he is with his production design, very particular angles and focus depth choices making even the real world seem a bit uncanny, frequently filming Ejiofor and Reinsve in ways that make their bodies seem out of proportion. It’s a clever way to introduce the most off-putting thing about the Backrooms – they remember things from the outside world to recreate them, but they don’t quite remember them right. They’re the sort of errors that generative AI image generators make frequently, not immediately noticeable at a casual glance, but really freaky when you start to really focus.
Though there is a little downtime – especially towards the climax which, sadly, drops the pace to far too slow and ends things on a bit of a whimper – Parsons packs the scares in. There are the sort of chases you’ll expect, often in found-footage first-person views (though the Backrooms concept didn’t start as a videogame, the visual and atmospheric influences of modern survival horror games are felt incredibly strongly), but also subtler and weirder stuff too. A Texas Chain Saw Massacre-inspired twisted dinner party scene is just wildly disturbing stuff that blindsided me and left me feeling a little bit ill.
Around all the action, the dialogue in Will Soodik’s script is a bit more perfunctory, the best story beats generally happening through wordless implication, but Ejiofor makes it sing. He’s really, really good here as Clark descends further and further into madness as he somewhat ‘goes native’ in the Backrooms, though Reinsve is a little miscast, her sleek European otherworldliness not meshing with the quietly disturbed American loner that Mary is meant to be.
These little imperfections do add up, but in a debut film that is so stylistically confident and effectively scary (this might be the most ‘fun-scary’ horror film since last year’s magnificent Weapons), they are minor gripes. Despite its ‘90s setting, Backrooms is Zoomer horror through and through, its characters trapped in a world they didn’t make that is desperately failing to recapture its old glories and killing any newcomers in the process, all wrapped up in baffling, impossible-to-navigate corporate packaging. After a decade or more of ‘elevated’ horror where ‘it was trauma all along’, how refreshing it is to have a young filmmaker break the mould with something that is both piercingly current in its fears and unafraid to have a big, gross monster careen around a haunted house.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 