Making a Movie Out of a Vibe Is Harder Than It Sounds

Like Curry Barker, the 26-year-old behind the box-office phenomenon Obsession, and Danny and Michael Philippou, the brothers behind Australian breakout Talk to Me, Backrooms director Kane Parsons is a creature of the internet. He got his start as a teenager by making a series of viral videos exploring the eerie concept that would become his directorial debut, and that in turn got the attention of A24. But who isn’t a creature of the internet these days? The agonizingly young Parsons, who’s still only a year or two into his 20s, has never lived in a world without YouTube, which was launched in 2005 — it’d be weirder if he hadn’t honed his skills online. What’s noteworthy about Parsons’s rise is less that he’s part of a generation of social-media natives and more that he’s also drawing from material that sprung up online.

Parsons didn’t create the Backrooms, an online mythos imagining an impossible kaleidoscope of empty office spaces and abandoned atriums and labyrinthine hallways that you can slip into like a gap between worlds. Like Slender Man, the Backrooms spontaneously generated on message boards and forums, growing from a 4Chan thread to a whole fandom built on images and posts in what was effectively a group writing exercise. Backrooms sits on top of years of online lore, which it tries to channel into the more traditional narrative of a horror movie starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as a furniture-store owner named Clark and Renate Reinsve as Dr. Mary Kline, his therapist. That the results are very mixed speaks to how hard it is to conjure a whole feature out of a vibe even if that vibe is a good one.

The Backrooms are a dark outgrowth of the whole liminal-spaces aesthetic, which celebrates the unsettling, melancholy aura of anonymous spaces emptied of the crowds they were intended for — like dead malls, or public libraries at night, or hotel hallways or airport passageways caught at a moment when no one else is around. A certain outdatedness is part of the deal, adding to the feeling that these places, which are neither personal enough in nature to belong to an individual nor unique enough to merit preservation, are the location equivalent of anonymous ghosts. This is especially the case in Backrooms, which is set in a 1990 that itself looks like it was furnished out of thrift stores and garage sales, from the matching polyester-blend sofa sets and curtains in Mary’s office to the understocked sales floor of Clark’s strip-mall store, which he’s been secretly living in at night after being thrown out of the house by his wife. Even before these characters make it into the otherworldly spaces for which the movie is named, Clark and Mary appear to be occupying a certain liminal existence with no apparent personal ties left in their lives or things they care about outside their jobs.

Clark, who works too much and drinks too much, wallows in resentment over his abandoned architecture career and in his sessions with the increasingly concerned Mary, acknowledges his shortcomings without expressing much interest in addressing them. When he notices a strange seam on the wall of the store’s basement one night, he realizes that it’s a passageway into what looks like an abandoned office space with fluorescent lighting and faded yellow wallpaper and a bunch of furniture piled in the middle. He’s made his way into the backrooms and finds that the place keeps going, offering up illogical doorways and holes in the floor. Rooms are filled with strange detritus like stop signs and piles of used clothes but also with occasional evidence that suggests other people have been there too, like a standee of a man with a tape deck reciting greetings in various languages or a surveillance camera attached to wires. He’s entranced by his discovery even though there appears to be some kind of ominous presence stalking the space, too, never quite caught on-camera. 

Clark, who barely has a toehold in the real world to begin with, disappears a little too easily into this nebulous space as though he also were something to be discarded when no longer useful. Or at least, that’s a very generous reading for a character who, in practice, barely has more dimension than the mysterious cardboard cutout he finds left in a hallway. Clark’s midlife malaise is expressed with all the conviction of a high-schooler with talcum powder in their hair playing Willy Loman, which is as much a script issue as a Parsons one — the screenplay, written by Will Soodik, somehow doesn’t spend enough time on either of its main characters for them to feel solid. There’s a childishness to the way both are given one trait in lieu of a personality, Clark with his resentment and Mary with her troubled childhood, like they’re the work of someone for whom grown-up problems are still abstract. When Mark Duplass turns up as a lab-coated figure who exists to provide the seed for a sequel, it’s clear that the intensely atmospheric nature of the backrooms sequences is attached to some downright inept structure. 

Arthouse horror has gone into a dormant phase, with recent flag bearers like Ari Aster and David Robert Mitchell off working in other modes, while allegorical horror feels like it has run itself into the ground with hackneyed entries like Him and Slanted. Meta horror may still be going strong, at least in the form of the Screams and the resurrected Scary Movie, but those franchises have been around for so long, they’re riffing incoherently on themselves at this point. It seems likely that the next big burst of fresh ideas in the genre will come from the internet, from creepypastas to memes to the digital versions of urban legends, the kind that provided the engine for haunted-podcast movie Undertone. But Backrooms suggests that while we’re teetering on the verge of something new, filmmakers are going to have to do more work to wrestle these nonnarrative, non-centralized ideas into something that can sustain a story.

Parsons is adept at building out the squishy logic of the liminal spaces he lays out. In the movie’s best sequence, we occupy the point of view of a character careening past couches half sunk into floors and particleboard consoles that stretch out like design glitches into a dark room lit only by a Christmas tree. It’s haunting but also weirdly inviting, the kind of space you’d want to keep exploring, despite knowing better. It’s just all the other stuff around it that needs work. 

Sign up for The Critics

A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers only.

Become a Subscriber

Already a subscriber? Sign in

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice

By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.