“Backrooms” is Lost in its Own Lore
Between Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, Hollywood is collectively losing its mind about a new wave of filmmakers who are rising through the ranks via homemade YouTube videos. Parsons’s path to getting the attention of A24 began with Let’s Play-style and meme videos of Minecraft, then teaching himself Blender. In 2019, he became interested in the Backrooms, a liminal space that came from a creepypasta. Three years later, Parsons released a short film called The Backrooms (Found Footage), which went viral and caught the attention of some of Hollywood’s biggest players.
Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire is a failing discount furniture store in an empty strip mall in the Santa Clara Valley. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is the captain of this failing enterprise. His wife is leaving him because all Clark cares about is a store that barely sees a customer. With nowhere to live, Clark sleeps in the store. In the middle of the night, he notices the lights of the store flicker for no discernible reason. This takes him to the basement, where he discovers a glowing slit in the wall that leads to a sprawling labyrinth of strange, yellow-wallpapered rooms. Despite the concerns of his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), about his growing obsession with the backrooms, Clark is wholly focused on mapping out the area.
Courtesy of A24
The opening of Backrooms is a recovered tape of an Async employee (Avan Jogia) exploring the weird rooms. It introduces a larger corporate conspiracy to the film, but it’s one that isn’t fully integrated. This is indicative of the larger issues with Backrooms. It was clearly constructed from a place that wanted to join the world of “elevated horror,” a genre that is growing more wearisome with every release like Backrooms. The worst version of an “elevated horror” movie is one that doesn’t understand that horror has always been a genre that has pushed boundaries, interrogated societal norms, and been about more than blood and guts. The monster movies of the 1950s are silly on paper, but are the manifestation of the atomic anxiety of the era. No one would look at The Blob and call it “elevated horror,” but it’s arguably making more of a statement than Backrooms.
Courtesy of A24
It’s undeniable that Parsons and writer Will Soodik have created an unsettling atmosphere, but that’s all there is to Backrooms. It’s a liminal space with nothing in it. There are half-hearted, heavy-handed gestures toward concepts of mental health and capitalism, but not in a way that actually says something. Backrooms raises these bigger ideas and then asks the viewer to fill in the blanks, but not in the way a challenging movie does. It’s not leaving anything to be discussed or ruminated on, but Backrooms feels unfinished. It’s as though they knew they wanted to touch on these subjects, but couldn’t figure out what they wanted to say.
The film ends with a return to Async, where a researcher (Mark Duplass) says the Backrooms are the greatest mystery in all of human history. Movies don’t have to answer every question they create, but they have to build a cohesive enough world for sweeping generalizations like that one to feel warranted. In the case of Backrooms, so much of the film wants viewers to believe it’s smart without proving it along the way. It’s exciting that a film based on an internet story could make it to the big screen helmed by a teenager, but Backrooms needed to plot its path in a more honed-in fashion.
Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Letterboxd, TikTok, YouTube, & Facebook. Check out Movies with My Dad, a podcast recorded on the car ride home from the movies and I Think You’ll Hate This, a podcast hosted by two friends who rarely agree.
support your local film critic!
~
support your local film critic! ~
Beyond the Cinerama Dome is run by one perpetually tired film critic
and her anxious emotional support chihuahua named Frankie.
Your kind donation means Frankie doesn’t need to get a job…yet.