Not the first feature film derived from distracting Internet nonsense, but maybe the best, Kane Parsons’s Backrooms might be difficult to fathom — as in, what the hell is it — without getting familiar with its backstory. Go ahead, Wiki it and look at the OG 2019 YouTube video(s), I‘ll wait. OK? Honestly, as creepypasta goes, that original “tape” is pretty seductive, one of the few aspects of deep Internet culture that has some real creative charm to it (if, in fact, it also makes terrifyingly quantifiable how much free time many, many people are wasting on 4chan, Reddit et al., starved for stimulation when they could be curing cancer or balancing the national budget or something). But look at all this churning imaginative fuss generated from a few not-so-fascinating images of empty windowless office space in Oshkosh, from whence came the labyrinth of online speculation and fantasizing that ultimately spawned Parsons’ new film. It’s gorgeously irrational, anti-algorithm, and certainly not something AI could’ve mustered from scratch. Why would it?
Parsons’s first videos were deliberately sparse and suggestive, but they got him an A24 springboard and an army of producers that includes B.O. home-runners like James Wan, Osgood Perkins, Shawn Levy, and Peter Chernin. Everybody presumably contributed to the whiteboard (script credit goes to TV writer Will Soodik), because the film, while luxuriating in the concept’s distinctive purgatorial vibe, generates a whole smorgasbord of wacky invention you wouldn’t have guessed at when the thin idea began circulating seven years ago. In the interests of unspoiling, let’s say the narrative’s kitchen-sink quality (childhood trauma, pirate decor, Blair Witchian- ookiness, male rage, first-person-shooter leveling, “misremembered” quasi-clones, etc.) is a constant source of surprise. Better than that, though, is the headlong exploitation of that original feeling. Like Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink (2022), but far rangier, Parsons’s movie vividly manifests the sense of being lost, in space and time, amid the mundane life-spaces of postwar America, clotted with cheap construction, moldy carpet, nagging fluorescents, dumb signage, dream-like repetitions, and desperate self-deception. David Lynch always knew there was something poisonous and sick out there; Parsons simply makes the qualm architecturally literal.
Parsons triples down on the demented-Escher conundrums.
Aptly, after a new found-footage Backrooms POV run-panic video someone is watching on an old TV, we’re in a bankrupt exurban retail wasteland, circa 1990. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a divorced discount furniture store owner in therapy for his anger issues and drinking; his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), is a demure pill-popper whose attempt at self-marketing with a self-help book has already failed. Parsons spends a serious amount of time with this therapeutic struggle, which does not go well, and his heavyweight cast makes the potentially rote characterizations throb. (Note to first-time genre filmmakers: Go for conviction, not beauty.) Eventually, and by accident, Clark (who’s been sleeping in his shitty store) encounters a basement wall he can walk through — discovering on the other side a kind of mirror-store, but one that spreads out in weird hallways forever. Mary doesn’t believe him when he tells her, so he recruits a young employee and her boyfriend (Lukita Maxwell and Finn Bennett) to help him explore and videotape….
Maybe it’s churlish to think novelist Mark Danielewski should’ve received a story credit, this basic premise being essentially thieved from his 2000 novel House of Leaves and the book’s goosey found-footage video, “The Navidson Record.” That is, if the whole fictional concept of the original online The Backrooms wasn’t from the beginning an aggregate of chatboard users’ own free-associative-nightmare reactions to that first liminal photograph of that abandoned Oshkosh office, which Parsons extrapolated upon. In any case, where the film goes from there is not only in its loony details not very Navidson Record-ish, and of course off-limits for spoiler’s sake, but pretty much unsynopsizable. (The plot summary on Wikipedia is to be shunned.) I might’ve wished that Clark’s psychological issues didn’t return to the front burner (really, if you’re trapped in this monster-stalked funhouse other-verse, you’ve got more pressing matters at hand), but I appreciated Parson’s wild design ideas, and how his Backrooms are checkered with remnants of the characters’ anxieties. (Clark’s store — Capt. Clark’s Ottoman Empire — has a pirate logo, so ship wheels and parrots and pieces of discount furniture randomly protrude out of the walls and ceilings; in the film’s last third, Parsons triples down on the demented-Escher conundrums.)
Is it a horror movie? Hard to say, since it mixes in DNA from Repulsion (1965), Solaris (1972), The Shining (1980), Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), stories by Philip K. Dick and Neal Stephenson, and maybe too many video games. Whatevs — it’s all about the feels, those yellow halls, that sense for us of the supposedly sensible adult world gone eerily, structurally wrong. It’s not too much, I think, to take the whole Backrooms phenomenon, from the first reposted photograph in 2019 to this extravagant movie (and including its own wiki index site, by the way), as a semi-organic sprouting of generational doubt and unease, focused almost arbitrarily on those dimwitted industrial spaces designed and built to facilitate the late-capitalist lifestyle we were all supposed to want. The cherry on top is this lovely spoiler: The explain-it-all expository scene you’re dreading — particularly once men in hazmat suits show up — never arrives. You’re still lost. ❖
