“Backrooms” is a film defined by firsts. It is the culmination of a years-long internet sensation around the broader Backrooms mythos, which began as an unsettling piece of flash fiction on 4chan in 2019 and later-spawned director Kane Parsons’s own YouTube series. With a record-breaking box office performance, this is the first high-profile movie derived from internet-based intellectual property, and the first A24 release directed by a 20-year-old filmmaker. “Backrooms” was poised to alter Hollywood’s valuation of horror regardless.
Thankfully, the film’s impact is one of hope for horror fans and aspiring auteurs. “Backrooms” lives up to its source material’s cult status in the found footage genre, using its uniquely abstract setting to great effect. In addition to the visceral thrills it provides, the titular Backrooms gradually reveal introspective elements of horror, functioning as an echo chamber for its inhabitants’ deepest flaws.
Discovered in the basement of a furniture store, the Backrooms are a labyrinthine parallel dimension of unknown origin which mimics real objects and locations with uncanny accuracy. Its gorgeously realized sets (based on Parsons’s own 3D renders, with at least 27,000 square feet of carpet) are simultaneously sprawling and claustrophobic — unnervingly long hallways are juxtaposed with cramped crawl spaces. Even sparsely decorated rooms are made disquieting by geometric anomalies like misplaced doors or randomly occurring inclines. The atmosphere of the Backrooms conveys the iconic fluorescent nightmare of the original mythos and, eventually, goes beyond by delving into the twisted logic of the dimension’s procedural generation. Parsons’s assured visual approach permeates the entire film; even shots outside of the Backrooms are suggestive of his larger ideas about how memories are distorted in isolation.
Within the actual execution of the film, “Backrooms” knows when to shift gears; taking clear inspiration from “Barbarian,” time jumps and perspective shifts break up the frequency of its scares. Heart-pounding found footage segments in the Backrooms are interspersed with moments of quiet contemplation from the outside world, cooling the narrative momentum right when it’s on the verge of overheating. It’s a smart way of squeezing more story out of the film’s lean runtime, though it occasionally causes a disjointed sense of progression.
This is a microcosm of the one major issue with “Backrooms,” which is its questionable grasp on character work. The inner lives of Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Mary (Renate Reinsve) are predictable and dull, a choice that’s undoubtedly intentional but uninspired to the point that their dangerous trips to the Backrooms are almost exciting when they should be frightening.
The rest of the cast, on the other hand, are barely characters at all. Phil (Mark Duplass), a scientist for the mysterious Async Research Institute, mostly serves to distract from the film’s most intriguing elements. Async’s presence also undermines the film’s otherwise steadfast avoidance of what Parsons calls “lore bloat,” providing logical meaning where emotional substance would have sufficed. The dialogue eventually takes an enjoyably pulpy turn in the third act of the film, but overall, the immersion is broken the longer these characters are allowed to go on speaking in clichés.
Whatever issues exist in the writing of the film are largely outweighed by its compelling imagery. None of the flaws are for a lack of trying; each scene is crafted with care by a director with a keen eye for visuals and the ambition to do more with this material than chase trends. In a crowded year for horror, “Backrooms” stands out as the work of a promising filmmaker who’s just getting started, a generation-defining exploration of how antisocial behavior is intensified by isolation and minimized by “therapy speak” and a landmark showcase of the possibilities of Internet-based horror.
Daily Arts Writer Sabrina Rosenstock can be reached at rosensab@umich.edu.
