Michael Fairbanks
Backrooms opens with a scene that shows us exactly why A24 enlisted 19-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons to bring his found-footage adaptation of the titular creepypasta from YouTube to the big screen. It’s an extended sequence in which we take the POV of a man hurling through a labyrinth of nearly identical yellow rooms. Despite how frantic he is moving, the camerawork is smooth and fluid. We get to take in every offputting corner of these garish setups while being all too aware that something is chasing our subject. It’s eerie and captivating. Real filmmaking in a world of slop. No wonder millions of chronically online young people took to it. However, in translating this decidedly niche format into a wide A24 release for the masses, a bit of novelty gets lost in the boardroom. Parsons is forced to break this format to introduce a series of characters via a conventional filmmaking style, and once his initial spell is lifted, we see just how much he still has yet to learn about storytelling.
We find ourselves in the early 1990s. The Backrooms lurk beneath a pirate-themed furniture store owned by cornball salesman Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor). He’s recently been kicked out by his ex-wife for temper issues, so he’s also sleeping in there once he’s done terrorizing his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), with outbursts during roleplay exercises. Delirious, he stumbles into the backrooms and becomes obsessed with them, eventually roping in the two poor kids who work for him (Shrinking’s Lukita Maxwell and A Night of the Seven Kingdom’s Finn Bennett) to investigate. What could possibly go wrong?
Kane Parsons will likely catch the brunt of the blame for Backrooms’ weaker segments, but it’s worth noting that he did not write this screenplay. TV scribe Will Soodik (Homeland, Westworld, Ash Vs The Evil Dead) is the culprit there, and the vast majority of his contributions are unfortunate. Parsons has been compared to many of his more esoteric predecessors in the horror genre, but with Soodick’s writing and Shawn Levy in the mix as a producer, his film comes closest to Stranger Things. Every sequence outside of the backrooms (and even some inside of them) is devoted to bluntly explaining every minute detail about what these characters are seeing, thinking, and feeling to the audience. It’s practically written for Netflix-style second-screen viewing, as if this team is anticipating that most of the target audience will be glued to their phones in the theater. While they may in part be right, it’s insulting to those who are genuinely interested in taking in Kane Parsons’s innovations, who could absolutely handle more subtlety and mystery. Instead, we’re spoonfed that these backrooms are, in fact, a thinly veiled metaphor for Clark’s sense of isolation post-divorce, only finding belonging in a place where there is seemingly nothing.
On that note, the painfully underrated Chiwetel Ejiofor carries this movie on his back. Somehow, this is his most full-bodied role since his Oscar-nominated turn in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, which will soon be 13 years old. He relishes the opportunity to play such a vapid, unlikable man. His most enjoyable flourishes come before he even discovers the maze. There’s a hilarious extended sequence in which his employees shoot a tacky commercial for the store with a camcorder. He keeps to the pirate theme, hobbling around the showroom on a peg leg and barely catching his breath to spew out the same sales catchphrase over and over again. A perfect huckster who allows us to detach our emotions from the danger of the backrooms for a while. We are supposed to find our empathy again through Renate Reinsve, but unfortunately, she finds herself completely adrift here. When working in a more subtle gear, the Oscar-nominated Reinsve is one of our finest working actors. She has to be far more open here, both when she’s expressing herself as a therapist and conveying terror once she inexplicably chases Clark into the backrooms. She just doesn’t quite sell either, especially since her English comes out a lot more stiff than Norwegian. I hate to say it, but I thought of Gal Gadot during some of the moments where she’s supposed to be more expressive.
Kane Parsons takes the wheel for one more effective handheld sequence at the midpoint. Otherwise, we’re stuck wandering around the backrooms through conventional filmmaking means. This slower approach brings out the dullness in the setting. If we’re not trying to process these rooms at light speed, they start to reveal themselves as just… rooms. They’re impeccably crafted by production designer Danny Vermette (Longlegs) but sterile by nature. As such, Parsons has to start directly incorporating creatures into the third act as the internal lore of the backrooms is laboriously explained to us. Renate Reinsve spends the third act fighting one of these creatures, and while the sequence is somewhat enjoyable, the monster is more funny-looking than terrifying. Then, as if the film’s momentum hasn’t been delayed enough, it forgoes a potentially haunting final image so that Mark Duplass can show up for a painfully unnecessary mumblecore exposition dump that wraps things up. It is a film constantly in conflict with innovation and convention, deathly afraid to commit to either for fear of alienating the shockingly large audience.
I look forward to what Kane Parsons does once he grows up a little and finds more autonomy within the system he’s been thrust into. Backrooms isn’t very good, but he certainly deserves credit for crafting the cinematic language that drives this high concept. Hopefully, he will either write his next screenplay or hire someone with more talent than Will Soodik, perhaps producers James Wan or Osgood Perkins. Hopefully, he doesn’t find himself trapped in the spiritual backrooms of sequels and spin-offs to this, which are entirely unwarranted. Despite the 30,000 feet of liminal space built for this, it feels cramped to the point of suffocation at 110 minutes.
