You cannot convince me that Backrooms isn’t talking about A.I. Even though the aesthetic “creepypasta” on which the movie is based first surfaced on the internet in 2019, the effect of its unnerving look and feel -the ‘errors’ in reality- is remarkably similar to the creepy attributes of a lot of generative A.I. Articulating exactly what is off about the Backrooms is by a couple characters likened to describing a dog to someone who has never seen a dog before and asking them to draw a picture of it: some details will be correct but the thing as a whole will not quite resemble what a dog actually looks like. And isn’t that just what A.I. does? Generate (from a library of stolen data) an approximation of something that broadly appears correct …until you look more closely at it, and the flaws in design become starkly apparent.
Kane Parsons may have considered that lens when he created his Backrooms web series while still a teenager in 2022. Four years later at the ripe old age of twenty, he has adapted that series as a feature for A24. Parsons is the youngest director A24 has ever hired on and with the movie claiming top spot at the box office opening weekend he is the youngest ever director to reach that feat. It is such that Mark Duplass, a filmmaker in his own right who appears in the film, has had to deny that he ghost-directed for this kid (Parsons did receive some mentoring from Osgood Perkins, one of a few filmmakers alongside James Wan and Shawn Levy who produced the film, but is broadly agreed to have been in creative control). Especially because, while Parsons’s work here can be a little rough at times, he has some pretty solid chops when it comes to that horror of liminal space.
His movie follows a disgruntled and struggling furniture store salesman Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, as well as his therapist Mary, played by Renate Reinsve. Reeling from a difficult divorce and an even more difficult sobriety, Clark while living in his business discovers in its basement a door to an extra-dimensional labyrinth of endless corridors resembling an empty and surreal dim office building with yellow walls, fluorescent lights, and occasionally furniture and other objects in odd, eerie configurations. As he explores the fluctuating space and its uncanny attributes he comes to realize there is another entity in there. Mary eventually enters these “Backrooms” herself when it appears that Clark has gone missing.
As with Parsons’ original series, a big part of this movie’s appeal and effect is the titular space, rendered in large part practically on sound stages so extensive there are reports of crew members having gotten lost in it. And it is legitimately a very freaky environment -that haunting emptiness broken only by surreal distractions such as a tower of furniture, a backwards STOP sign in the middle of an enclave, or a cardboard cut-out with a voice box playing a foreign audio guide. These elements catch the attention and curiosity of both the characters venturing around them and the audience, and the constant aesthetic riddles of the Backrooms fuels a lot of tension, especially in the way that Parsons chooses to shoot the movie. There are two sequences -a prologue at the very beginning and then one section in the middle that are shot with an analogue handheld camera found-footage -style (which was apparently how the web series was constructed). And these certainly have their moments in terms of how information is revealed and how a couple of the scares manifest -the last little part of this presentation does garner a couple really chilling beats- but they are visually clunky and chaotic (by design, though it’s not a strong choice).
More clever and thrilling though is the gradual, considered cinematography of Clark’s initial exploration and the last act following Mary. The camera moves gracefully but hauntingly with the characters through rooms and around corners allowing the audience to take in the strange senseless layout. Parsons seems to have taken some influence from how Kubrick shot the Overlook, using the ambiguity of the place to heighten tension and often draw your eye to aspects of it that play a bit with your perception. And some of the most chilling moments come from what you think you might see, in a stain on the floor or a shadow around a corner.
There is a link between the Backrooms and the discombobulated head-space of Clark, a man defined by resentment, frustration, and irritation. And perhaps that is why he develops a fascination with the Backrooms rather than a fear. Certainly, the ever-so-slightly warped dimensions reflect his own skewed perception of what went wrong with his marriage and his business -itself a considerable downgrade to his dreams of being an architect. Ejiofor gives one of his best performances in years as this sad sack with accountability issues, a subtle misogynist desperate for easy answers to his problems that he perhaps hopes to find in the Backrooms without having to face himself and his own culpability in his misfortune. This is laid out to him in a critical, freaky scene perhaps too bluntly by Mary, who sees the Backrooms herself as a manifestation of her unresolved adolescent trauma -they in fact resemble the dingy confines of her boarded up childhood home. It's an excellent performance from Reinsve as well, it is a shame that it is largely confined to the last act.
That is where a lot of the creepiest bits of the movie are, very deep into the Backrooms. Of course there is a monster eventually revealed and it is a ghoulish abomination with an effectively symbolic appearance, but there is a considerable degree of nightmare fuel apart from it as well. And I use that term very specifically, the surreal imagery and hypnotic atmosphere of the Backrooms, as well as just the premise of trying to navigate them while fleeing from an unseen terrifying force feels ripped from a real nightmare -it certainly resembles some that I’ve had. The proportions of the rooms and figures have such an eerie quality -those dark corners and shadows that are completely impenetrable, the grummiest spaces with items or laundry scattered around in a manner that corners you in; there is a pool that threatens to swallow you whole, a dark room illuminated by a single Christmas tree in its centre with unknowable things just outside its ray of light. And then of course those objects melded to the walls or floor and the entities that look not quite human -explicitly wrong replicas of something real that epitomize visually all the most off-putting elements of A.I. It feels right that the A.I. analogues are the horrors here and that the figure who insists on their harmlessness meets a horrible end.
As stated, the movie’s intentions can sometimes be on the nose and it’s script lacks for subtlety at times -some of the dialogue can feel off, and not in a way that compliments the nature of the Backrooms. There are also small signs to Parsons’ inexperience in the freneticism of those handheld sequences where the effect supersedes clarity and neuters some intended scares, as well as in the efforts at world-building toward the end that feel directly amateur. But it is only around the end, and Parsons smartly reigns it in considerably (perhaps he’s waiting for a sequel), understanding that the mystery and ambiguity of the Backrooms is their most effective feature and doesn’t provide the audience with much in the way of answers to its anomalies or genuine threat. That is a mark of a shrewd director, again remarkable in someone so young. That Backrooms is so creepy, and in a manner that is unlike a lot of other horror films speaks to that as well. It successfully translates this piece of internet culture to the mainstream like no other movie has done, capturing why it worked so starkly in that format and establishing a strong identity for this new one. And perhaps changing the way its audience looks at empty rooms.
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