Backrooms
by Hope Madden
There is reason to compare Backrooms, feature debut from 19-year-old co-writer/director Kane Parsons, to Skinamarink, the 2022 feature debut from writer/director Kyle Edward Ball. If you are one of the many who found Ball’s nightmare an effective, even terrifying head trip, Backrooms might be for you.
If you didn’t, that’s OK too. Backrooms shares the true experiential nature—you may feel as though the director has somehow filmed your actual nightmares. But a lot more happens in this one.
Backrooms is liminal space horror, not entirely unlike Genki Kawamura’s effective video game adaptation, Exit 8. But for all these comparisons, Parsons crafts an unnervingly unique excursion into the uncanny.
Captain of that voyage is Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor). He manages a furniture store where he dresses like a pirate for low-fi ads. It’s 1990. Clark wanted to be an architect. He just keeps making the same mistakes, like a circuit he follows forever expecting a different destination. That’s why he sees Dr. Mary Krane (Renate Reinsve).
Let’s pause, because that’s reason enough to see the movie. Here are two actors who’ve built careers on understated, natural performances that ground every moment onscreen in something honest. Which makes them a magnificent choice for a film where nothing makes sense, and that’s the whole point.
Kane adapts a series of shorts that made him a YouTube force, all of it based on online Twenty-teens creepypasta dread of being trapped eternally in an endless, yellow, moistly carpeted maze of empty rooms with no hope of escape.
The fact that Parsons turned this concept into a compelling feature essentially about our own labyrinthine minds and psychiatry’s impotence is pretty impressive for a fucking teenager!
Both leads give the film earnest vulnerability and obvious intelligence, which sells the madness. Their few scenes together are wonderful, but that’s not simply because of their talent. The script is engrossing, forever mirroring what’s been seen and said in a way that could feel heavy handed were it not for Kane’s sure direction.
It’s easy to make a trippy movie that doesn’t make sense because you don’t really have to make sense. A lot of bad horror leaves you guessing because of sloppy scripting. Backrooms never feels sloppy. Every tee shirt, piece of furniture, neighborhood street feels intentional, tells its own story. Everything loops, remembers but doesn’t, until you can’t shake the dread that nothing is right.
Backrooms, because it’s so singular in its vision, won’t sit with everyone. But for those of us who have nightmares of being trapped in room after windowless room of fluorescent buzz and mildew smell, this is our Skinamarink. I mean that in the best way possible.
