Frightful thoughts come to mind watching “Backrooms,” the Vancouver-filmed horror movie by YouTube sensation Kane Parsons. Thoughts like, is the strange mildew smell in my basement coming from all the old furniture jammed in there, or something worse? And is this the summer I’m finally going to clean all the crap out of the garden shed?
These are strange things to ponder about a movie that’s supposed to give you the willies, not domestic worries, but “Backrooms” doesn’t strain to scare. It’s more into unnerving us, making us sense “something’s off,” as a character puts it. The film’s dominant colour is a bilious, sickly yellow that gets into your gag reflex more than under your skin. I’ve seen episodes of “Hoarders” that were more disturbing.
This feature debut by Parsons, who at age 20 may well be A24’s youngest-ever director, is based on his wildly viral online series of a similar name that explores liminal space: creepily abandoned, in-between places that exist at the surreal edge of human consciousness.
The year is 1990, the location is San Jose, Calif., and the liminal is subterranean: the seemingly endless basement of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a pirate-themed discount furniture store run by an angry man named Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor). A failed architect with a serious drinking problem and a marriage that’s also on the rocks, Clark is struggling to sell ugly furniture even he wouldn’t buy.
His strip-mall store may be haunted by ghosts but not by customers. He tries to drum up business with homemade TV ads, dressed as a pirate with a parrot on his shoulder. They’re shot on VHS-quality video by his slacker employee, Kat (Lukita Maxwell), and her boyfriend, Bobby (Finn Bennett). Nothing’s working.
Clark pours out his woes to his therapist, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), an intense woman with problems of her own. Flashbacks revealing her childhood with an agoraphobic hoarder mom don’t add up to happy memories.
Back at the furniture store, curious about a flickering light in the basement, Clark goes downstairs to investigate. He discovers a null space, an unseen wall portal, leading into a place he’ll come to know as the Backrooms. He finds a maze of seemingly endless abandoned offices, swathed in urine-yellow wallpaper and lit by harsh fluorescent lights. All of this is captured by a shaky camera doing the “Blair Witch” found-footage thing.
Walls and doors meet at random. Hallways abruptly turn and end. The context is dull chaos. “It’s like it’s made by a bunch of construction workers on acid,” Clark says.
Discarded office furniture, broken TV sets and dirty clothing are strewn about. On this and subsequent visits, Clark also discovers stop signs stopping nothing and a room with an artificial Christmas tree and a speaker playing “Feliz Navidad” like the Yuletide special from hell.
Are those voices off in the distance, and are there other people (or things) skulking about or just cardboard or hallucinatory versions of them? It’s so hard to tell.
Some sounds are musical and others infernal. Parsons wrote the unearthly, synth-driven score with composer Edo Van Breemen.
Fans of the online original called “The Backrooms” will recognize many familiar things, among them a company called Async, represented here by a mild-mannered nerd named Phil (Mark Duplass), who seems to know a lot about the Backrooms.
The Async angle makes the film seem of a piece with the scary science of Alex Garland’s “Annihilation,” with its mysterious quarantine zone known as the Shimmer. Nothing good happens in strange places where shadowy people pursue covert operations.
The meandering plot of “Backrooms” begins to pick up after Clark starts missing his therapy sessions and Mary gets worried. She goes to Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire to look for him.
Ejiofor and Reinsve, both Oscar nominees with impeccable careers, strive hard to make this story seem at least a little terrifying. They can only work with what they’re given, which isn’t much. Ejiofor is a gifted actor stranded in a maze that doesn’t quite know what to do with him; ditto for the screenplay. Reinsve, so luminous in “The Worst Person in the World,” is similarly underused. She’s a warm presence in a very cold, very yellow room.
Followers of the “The Backrooms” web series will be delighted by the film’s fidelity to Parsons’ original concepts. Less devoted viewers may feel more inclined to yawn than scream.
“Exit 8,” a recent liminal horror film I admired more than this one, has a similar M.C. Escher-style endless esthetic, with white subway walls that feel genuinely disorienting and menacing.
In “Backrooms,” the yellow wallpaper just makes you feel vaguely ill. That may be the ultimate point of the picture, but it isn’t quite enough.
If this movie’s a hit, I’m going to write a script about my kitchen junk drawer. It’s scarier than Clark’s basement.
