by Adrian Nguyen
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell
Intro:
… suffers from the incoherence it depicts, not knowing when to finish its world building.
The concept of the backrooms is derived from a set of online images showing only empty but peaceful hallways. Kane Parsons’ original online series reinvented the phenomenon by placing the viewer carefully in a place that it’s almost impossible to escape. In Parsons’ directorial debut, Backrooms, it’s the first scene, shot with meticulous analog found footage, where an unseen character panics, proving this effect with a jumpscare.
The yellow-tinged corridors reveal their own horrors, and as office furniture builds up and the design becomes more absurd, it becomes exhausting.
Backrooms isn’t just about being emotionally and physically trapped, but a halt in time passing, as you continue to dig deep into its logic.
Backrooms closely follows the tradition of liminal horror, set by its predecessors like The Shining or Pulse, as well as the works it has already influenced like Severance where its endless worldbuilding makes its characters more dissociated from reality (or in internet terms, being “no-clipped”). But where it deviates from those works is Parsons’ vivid attention to detail, where staid compositions, sweeping shots and a creepy soundtrack often seduces you into an Escher-esque landscape.
As with Curry Barker (Obsession), Parsons is an online content creator whose cinematic sensibilities aren’t shaped by the great horror movies he has engaged with, but from other pieces of media that parodies those works. Whereas Barker stated that a Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror segment inspired Obsession, Parsons gets his vision by drawing from video games like Portal and mysterious anime like Paranoid Agent. Given that the Backrooms on the internet have a tendency to pull the viewer into a rabbithole, the movie contains a metatextural layer that enhances its role as a meme.
Backrooms is also an intriguing character study, although it’s underset by Will Soodik’s undercooked screenplay. It depicts a man who descends into discovering a new place, thinking that would turn him into the person he wants to be. That man is Clark, who owns a furniture store where the backrooms are located, but before that, he’s a failed architect and is divorced due to alcoholism. He’s played with frightening depth by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who deludes himself into thinking that he has control of his own destiny while descending into different directions. He wants to use this discovery against his therapist Dr Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), whose therapy methods do not work with him. If Clark is the meatier role, by contrast, Mary doesn’t really have much to do, except to see her own reflection on what her own personal failings are.
Backrooms suffers from the incoherence it depicts, not knowing when to finish its world building. When it does, it unfortunately succumbs to cliché. [Will the new rules continue to be expanded into a franchise, presuming that this film is commercially successful?] But Parsons’ aesthetic is strong enough to make this a minor issue, because it’s part of a multimedia project whose roots span from the online sphere that only asks, “how far can you literally go for”. Parsons will go that far.
