Lost in the Labyrinths of the Mind: Backrooms

Chiwetel Ejiofor in Kane Parson's Backrooms. (Photo: A24 Pictures.)

Kane Parsons’s Backrooms is some very clever filmmaking. The elevator pitch could’ve been “Skinamarink, but cinematic.”

The plot, set in 1990, is simple. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a divorced failed architect and all-around sad sack who now runs a failing furniture store with an unusually high power bill. One night, he notices something odd about a basement wall of his store, touches it, and passes through it to discover a seemingly endless warren of empty office space, with sickly yellow-green wallpaper and fluorescent lighting. Some of the rooms feel . . . incomplete. And there are strange objects and noises. When his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) doesn’t believe him, he cancels his future sessions to explore further, sometimes with the reluctant help of shop assistant Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett), who brings a camera to document the findings. Mary ends up going in through that invisible doorway to find him.

Granted, some of the characters’ actions have no motivation except for the plot, but the discovery of an entire hidden world through an invisible door in your basement is kind of intriguing – at least, before you meet the monsters. It’s why those Narnia kids entered their wardrobe. And though, as a Black man in a horror film, Clark may strike one initially as especially ingenuous, we learn that he recognizes his unconscious in the backrooms, so it’s the familiarity that disarms him. The one unforgivable faux pas is when Bobby, having just climbed out of a vertical shaft to escape a monster, neglects to pull up the rest of the tether he used to explore it with. And the biggest plot hole is that the Pirate monster, with its wide, loping gait, can successfully navigate a narrow ledge and stairs.

Danny Vermette’s production design really stands out. Parsons’s entirely digitally animated YouTube videos, from which the film is adapted by Will Soodik, can get by on the low-res small screen, but for the hi-res cinema, Vermette designed and built a 30,000-sqft. set, in which people sometimes actually got lost. Cinematographer Jeremy Cox’s lighting is also outstanding, finding subtle shadows within the high contrasts between light and dark. As Midsommar showed, true horror is scary even when well-lit.

Which brings us to the monsters. They are terrifying to look at, low-res monstrosities in a hi-res world. The Pirate in particular also draws on the uncanny, a distorted, enlarged, and dehumanized version of the man we’ve gotten to know so well over the past hour. In many horror films, our fear of the monster trumps anything the filmmakers hold up in the light. But Backrooms is so confident in its ability to terrify that it shows us exactly what the monster is twenty minutes before the actual reveal, and it’s still scary! In fact, it’s scariest when seen up close, from Mary's perspective as she holds it off at mere arm’s length. Often, horror films will mark the monster or villain by giving them some kind of disability. But by giving the Pirate a fake limp, this film manages to eat its cake and have it, too.

The real MVP is Parsons’s POV camera direction. We feel the urgent need to see around every corner at once. This is a tried and true horror technique, of course; what’s new is that the whole film is basically just corners, matched by Eugenio Battaglia’s diabolical spatial sound design and Parsons and Edo Van Breemen’s driving, discordant score. The fact that the invisible door lets in people, objects, and sound, but not light, and that Kat is at one point stuck behind a one-way window through which Clark can't see, highlights that the true source of the horror is when vision, the sense on which we over-rely, fails us.

The whole thing – production design, camera direction, sense of dread, invisible door, and even those monsters – reminds me of the N64 game GoldenEye 007, notably the bonus levels, Aztec and Egyptian. Though born from Parsons’s YouTube videos (and before that a 4chan image), the film’s operative logic makes it another example of the videogame aesthetic in cinema.

Soodik’s story manages to not tie everything up into a neat allegorical bow. Rather than being interesting in their own right, the character backstories feel reverse-engineered to fit the backrooms motif of architectural space representing the human psyche: Clark the architect manqué, Mary with her childhood trauma of institutionalized mother and demolished home. Yes, it all has something to do with the mind, but it’s a Jungian conception, perhaps even literalizing the metaphor of Jungian psychoanalysis. The Pirate is a manifestation of Clark’s shadow self; when Clark tries out radical self-acceptance, it kills him. Mary escapes into the safe arms of Mark Duplass's unnamed explorer character, but she still can’t escape the backrooms. And with that final shot and the end credits music, it feels like neither can we.

– CJ Sheu has a PhD in contemporary American fiction from National Taiwan Normal University, in Taipei. He also writes about films and film reviews on the side, and has been published in Bright Wall/Dark Room and Funscreen (Taiwan). Check out his blog reviewfilmreview.wordpress.com/about, or hit him up on X/Twitter @cj_sheu.