Movie Review: Backrooms

Sometime in the 2010s, a photograph of a large, carpeted room with fluorescent lights and pale-yellow dividing walls circulated on various message boards. While seemingly a picture of nothing, in 2019, one 4chan user posted the image in a thread for “disquieting images that just feel ‘off,” on one of the paranormal-themed message boards. This sent other 4chan users into a tizzy, as they came up with their own origins and stories about this mysterious Backroom.

In 2022, 16-year-old Kane Parsons uploaded a short horror film titled Backrooms on YouTube. The short is presented as a VHS tape from the 1990s and follows a filmmaker who accidentally enters one of these Backrooms and is pursued by a monster.  The short garnered 78 million views and was eventually turned into a series of liminal horror shorts and now, a feature-length film, backed by A24 and Parsons behind the camera, with a slew of big names producing, including modern horror directors Osgood Perkins and James Wan.

I had no relationship with Backrooms before entering the movie. I never saw the short films or the original image that started the phenomenon, so this was all new to me. But I found the origin of the Backrooms more interesting than the feature-length film. While the film does show some overall promise from Parsons as a director, the script doesn’t do the idea justice.

So how did Parsons turn a pale-yellow photo into a feature-length film? He sets the film in the 90s and centers it on Clark (Chiwetel Ejifor), an alcoholic who was just kicked out of his house by his wife and is struggling to keep his furniture business open. When his store lights begin exhibiting weird flickering patterns, he searches for the problem, only to find a secret portal into a Backroom, a mysterious and seemingly endless maze of rooms filled with random furniture. The only person Clark can confide in is his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), who doesn’t believe anything he is saying. Clark explores the Backroom further, learning of its dark secrets and the horrors that live in it.

There were two scenes of genuine greatness in Backrooms. The first was the very opening, which I imagine was either one of Parsons’ original Backrooms short films or something similar. Shot on a 90s video camera, an unknown man is being chased around the Backroom by a mysterious creature. The other scene is when Clark, fully invested in what is happening in the Backroom, asks two of his employees to join him in exploring the depths of the Backroom. Both sequences have the 90s camcorder look, and both are suspenseful, crafty, and have moments of true terror. Having never seen any of the original Backrooms shorts, this was a great way to introduce someone like me to the vibe and tone of those films, and Parsons did an excellent job.

The rest of Backrooms, which was shot in standard digital, is far less interesting than these two scenes. The script by Will Soodik is poorly written, with stilted characters with no depth and basic dialogue. Backrooms doesn’t know which character to focus on, whether it be Clark and his life spiraling into nothing, or Mary, whose trauma continues to haunt her well into her adult years. Both characters would have been interesting on their own, but both of them being in the same movie cannibalizes their story potential, giving neither of them enough to be interesting. Credit to Ejiofor and Reinsve for making something out of nothing and giving good performances. The scenes in digital also lack scares and suspense, which is a problem when this is how most of your movie is shot.

Backrooms is a fun attempt at capitalizing on an internet craze. Parsons’ direction is strong, and I am interested in seeing what he’s capable of doing with a good script and outside of the Backrooms style.

TL;DR Review of Backrooms

• Kane Parsons’ direction is good.
• There are a few moments of genuine suspense and terror, but most of the film is boring.
• The script is bad. The dialog is stilted, the characters have no depth, and the story feels incomplete.
• An interesting first film from Parsons with two good performances by Ejiofor and Reinsve.

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