Backrooms

Hot on the heels of Mark Fischbach’s Iron Lung and Curry Barker’s Obsession, Kane Parsons’ Backrooms is another horror movie by a fledgling feature director whose shorts have built up a huge subscription base on YouTube. But this surreal offering is quite unlike any horror movie you’ve seen. If references must be offered as fingerholds to cling to, it’s something like The Blair Witch Project spliced with Cube blended with Synecdoche, New York, mostly shot in liminal spaces lit in queasy mono-yellow.

Confused? You will be. Unless, of course, you’re familiar with Parsons’ web series that grew out of a 4chan creepypasta image of a large, oddly shaped room. From the thrumming disquietude of that image, Parsons built 20-plus instalments revolving around fictional research facility Async as it attempts to document a dimension outside of reality. Now, in the movie, Async scientists led by Mark Duplass haunt the periphery, but the main focus is civilian Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who inexplicably passes through a wall in the basement of his drab furniture store, into the Backrooms. Shocked, scared, intrigued, he sets about exploring its strangely angled, segmented spaces connected by tapering passageways, jutting staircases and small, Alice-In-Wonderland-type doorways. What he discovers is a seemingly endless maze that makes the Overlook Hotel look like a roadside motel. (Twice Parsons directly nods to The Shining, which shares Backrooms’ corridors-as-neural-pathways metaphor.)

Occasionally the rooms possess items, like dirty laundry or a Christmas tree or furniture melted into the floor; always there is the insistent buzz of fluorescent lights and the drone of an ambient score that might be whale music in Satan’s spa. “None of it makes any sense,” he tells therapist Mary (Norwegian arthouse queen Renate Reinsve), whose own traumatic childhood lends her a mysterious link to this otherworld. Many viewers will likely nod in sympathy. But for all those who will doubtless be relieved that a nightmarish final scene and then a coda offer hints of explanation, others will wish that Parsons kept us entirely in the dark (or should that be in the scuzzy yellow?).

Switching between the rigorous lensing of an objective camera and lurching, found-footage-style perspectives, Backrooms is one of the most out there, surreal, art-horror features since David Lynch’s Eraserhead. The web series might boast 200 million views since debuting in 2022, but this movie is most certainly not for everyone. It favours opacity, half-glimpsed creatures and a steady sense of unease over crowd-pleasing jumps, and is sure to spark endless debate and interpretations among those who aren’t bored silly by it.