RATING
Director: Kane Parsons
Country: United States
Actor(s): Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass
Written by Tom Augustine
Filmmaker Kane Parsons adapts the series of Youtube shorts that became a viral sensation when he was a teenager into a gnawingly tense and atmospheric feature debut that showcases a robust directorial sensibility. It’s a liminal horror that’s better the less it attempts to explain itself.
Cinema is full of netherworlds and otherworlds, places where the lines between dream and reality blur. The act of engaging in storytelling itself is to trespass into a space that is not our own, and few art forms have as sturdy a vessel for such a journey as the cinema. The worlds of Oz, Wonderland, the subconscious levels of Nolan’s Inception, Coraline’s Other World — though they may have had their roots in other forms of art, cinema gives us a direct, immersive line, via the alchemical trick that is still images blurring together at speed.’
The internet is another of these portals — a place we all make and populate together with our collective cultural memories and anxieties, a place where perspective, truth and reality can become unmoored all too easily. It is where the ‘Backrooms’, one of Generation Z’s most beloved otherworlds came into being, growing from a chatroom thread into Kane Parsons’ viral ‘creepypasta’ Youtube series, with plenty of detours along the way. These dense, endless hallways, evoking mundane officecore dread, filled with nightmarish creations dredged from the deepest pools of the psyche, are a touchstone of a particular kind of warped-nostalgia internet paranoia, carrying the understanding that it was not the witch that made The Blair Witch Project scary, but the means by which it was (un)seen — the amateurish, handheld, home-video-by-way-of-surveillance aesthetic of digicam. Is the internet not, itself, a series of endless, difficult-to-parse corridors?
Twenty-year-old director Kane Parsons, whose feature debut was greenlit off the back of the webseries he made as a teen, has an enormous wealth of resources at his disposal for the big-screen A24 adaptation of Backrooms but, tellingly, chooses to open the film with a sequence filmed on a nineties-era video camera. Indeed, the film is set in the early 1990s (the most chilling fact of all may be that Parsons was not even alive for this period whose aesthetic he so cunningly manipulates) as an unseen man scrambles from room to room, chased by an unknowable menace. It is fair to say that Backrooms is the most anticipated of the recent glut of Youtuber filmmakers’ big-screen debuts, a number that includes mega-success Obsession, the Philippou Brothers’ Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, Mark Fischback’s Iron Lung, and so on. It’s a phenomenon that has stunned box office prognosticators with its drawing power — here is a vein of filmmaking talent untapped, where the amorphous youth of today first discovered their favourite auteurs. All of these filmmakers largely trade in horror, frequently ‘liminal horror’, a variation on the uncanny that induces fear through the use of cavernous, empty, eerily-familiar spaces.
It is into a space such as this that Chiwetel Ejiofor’s struggling furniture salesman Clark inadvertently stumbles while trying to fix the breakers in his failing outlet store — a wall that is not a wall at all, but rather a portal into a forever maze of increasingly bizarrely designed rooms, that seem to have some relation to Clark’s fracturing psychological state. Clark is on the verge of financial insolvency, smarting from a failed marriage, growing alcoholism and broken dreams of being an architect. His one source of connection is his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve), herself grappling with the trauma of her agoraphobic mother, who locked them in their house at a young age. As Clark becomes more and more obsessed with mapping out the space, Mary becomes drawn into the mystery against her better judgment.
If there is one thing Backrooms isn’t, it’s ‘Lynchian’. The newly popular term, referring to the labyrinthine and transgressive work of David Lynch, is too often easily equated with the surreal, or the uncanny. While these are certainly vital to Lynch’s work, his view on the world is far deeper, more loving and more mysterious than a one-to-one comparison like this. If there’s an auteur that Backrooms is truly in debt to, it’s Stanley Kubrick, with whom Parsons shares a fondness for slightly fish-eye lenses, complex set design and precise camerawork. The clear touchstone is The Shining, with its impossible architecture and subjective contours of reality, but Backrooms has more than a little of 2001’s final resting place in its DNA, too. In Backrooms’ clever willingness to literalise the dark corridors of the human psyche, Parsons’ film also tips its hat to the work of Charlie Kaufman, whose films like Being John Malkovich, Synecdoche, New York and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind find a horror-specific, modern-day analogue here.
Backrooms is undoubtedly the best-directed of the Youtuber films, revealing an enormous talent at the very beginning of their career. Parsons is a patient filmmaker, preferring to suffocate his audience in his atmospheric compositions and compelling sound design than hammer them with gore and jump scares. Backrooms is a profoundly absorbing film, one that achieves what many great horrors do, which is to make the world outside the cinema, on the drive home, seem slightly different for the influence it has exerted on your psyche. Fittingly, Backrooms is best the more it leans into the inexplicable — the mystery of what the place is, and how it found its way to Clark specifically, is never entirely explained, and attempts to render the concept into a simple metaphor (the Backrooms are a reflection of Clark’s subconscious, for example) are gleefully inverted by Parsons’ cunning dream logic. Rational solutions slip through your fingers in real time, the suggestive elements at play in the film’s remarkable production design open to an audience member’s interpretation. An early sequence, as Clark wanders from room to room, plays out in almost total silence for an extended period of time — not the kind of thing we might expect from a filmmaker who cut his teeth in the hyperactive realm of Youtube. Even in the ‘real’ world, a distinct sense of unreality wafts through proceedings, as though the Backrooms themselves are bleeding into the front of shop, and beyond. For such a young filmmaker, the real sign of Parsons’ ability is his consistency of tone.
Where Parsons’ youth is more deeply felt is in the film’s handling of personal drama, which feels thinly sketched in spite of the presence of two world-class actors in Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor, who do their best to elevate some leaden material. It is functionally impossible for Reinsve to be uninteresting on-screen, but the characterisation she and Ejiofor receive feels by-the-numbers, perfunctory, and begins to graft walls around the ephemerality of Backrooms that aren’t useful. The film’s script, particularly its dialogue, bears the hallmarks of a filmmaker who doesn’t yet have a grasp of strong dramaturgy, its expositional elements only serving to frustrate. Any time the film sets out to define some element of what we’re watching, particularly in the presence of Mark Duplass as a stuffed shirt working for a shadowy government organisation investigating the Backrooms, we ironically feel less confident in the story we’re being told. The need to tack ‘lore’ onto our stories is surely one of the greatest evils the modern Marvelisation of cinema has unleashed on our world, and even the liminal, terrifying Backrooms is not immune to it, it seems, as the potential for a sequel is all but assured come the final few scenes. One feels Parsons struggling against these boundaries, whether they are self-imposed or studio-mandated, his confidently understated approach contradicting these more pedestrian elements. In the end, this is a debut — one that is most notable for showcasing a high-potential talent with an already firm grasp on his voice and point of view. What would a truly unrestrained Parsons film look like? That eventuality is almost certainly ahead of us, in some undisclosed location.
Backrooms Is In Cinemas Now.