What evil lurks in the drabbest of interiors?
The meme-rooted “Backrooms” is the latest movie to pull its mounting horrors out of liminal spaces. “Exit 8,” released earlier this year, was set entirely in a subway corridor. In “Backrooms,” a struggling furniture salesperson discovers beneath his store an underground labyrinth, all lined with yellow wallpapered walls and fluorescent lighting.
Where “Backrooms” came from is more interesting — and potentially meaningful — than the result. The movie, directed by 20-year-old YouTuber-turned-filmmaker Kane Parsons, is a fitfully unsettling nightmare that never convincingly builds beyond its creepy, dated-decor premise.
But the “Backrooms” backstory is more intriguing. In 2019, an anonymous post on 4chan creepypasta — an online repository for internet-created urban legends — provided the initial image of the seemingly infinite Backrooms with a caption describing “nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz.”
Like many others, Parsons — who has posted under “Kane Pixels” — picked up the idea and ran with it. His YouTube series expanded on the 4chan post, adding a found footage approach. Eventually, A24 greenlit his movie, the big-screen product of an internet-born concept.
But while the hive mind of the internet can produce some glorious things, movies require closer to a single author. And “Backrooms,” written by Will Soodik and produced by Osgood Perkins, struggles to retrofit a compelling story to match its disquietingly banal imagery.
Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is the not-exactly-proud owner of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a sad and empty furniture store located in a 1990s strip mall. He has plenty of concerns — his failed architect aspirations, the end of his marriage, any customers at all — but unexplained electric troubles at the store also nag him. The lights keep flickering.
When Clark inspects the circuit breaker, there are odd, irregular breakers at the bottom of the panel. Who put them there? What are they for? If there’s one thing “Backrooms” gets spot on, it’s the mysteries of the circuit breaker. One night, Clark goes looking in the store’s lower floor when he unwittingly passes right through the wall, and into the Backrooms.
Wonderland it is not. The seemingly never-ending chambers almost resemble vacant, nondescript office spaces. But they’re stranger, like art installation versions of office space. There are piles of furniture, shrunken doors and disturbingly random things like a stop sign or a cardboard cutout with a cassette player saying hello in different languages. Clark later describes the rooms as though they were made “by a bunch of construction workers on acid.”
The uncanny dimensions and strange recesses of modern workplaces have been a common motif lately, from “Severance” to “The Chair Company.” And it’s hard not to see the endless iterations of the Backrooms as a metaphor for the internet itself.
But Parsons pushes the setting into a psychological realm. One of the only other characters we see Clark interact with before he grows obsessed with exploring the rooms is his therapist, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). “We all have our loops, our habits,” she tells him in a session.
The subterranean labyrinth increasingly begins to resemble a warped version of Clark’s own looped psychology. Its many doors go deeper into his psyche, and Mary (whose new book is titled “The Window Within”) becomes trapped too.
As a horror, fluorescent-lit riff on Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Backrooms” doesn’t quite work. While the movie finds a potentially insightful pathway to a story, it can’t bridge its very physical, wall-to-wall-carpeted labyrinth with Clark’s mental state. A movie with so many doors ultimately can’t find the right one.
Despite a paper-wall-thin concept, both Ejiofor and Reinsve give “Backrooms” some depth. Ejiofor has almost always been a supremely level-headed screen presence, but here embraces a latent capacity for fevered mania. Reinsve, the star of “The Worst Person in the World” and “Sentimental Value,” proves especially absorbing in her first horror film. She gives the movie a slinky intelligence.
But the real star is Danny Vermette’s production design. Banal and bizarre at once, the Backrooms serve as a mysterious rabbit hole. Horror films have long found trouble down the stairs, but the movies — like 2022’s “Barbarian” — seem to be digging even deeper. It’s no wonder the movie gets lost down there, too.
“Backrooms,” an A24 release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language and some violent content/bloody images. Running time: 105 minutes. Two stars out of four.
