Critic After Dark

Labyrinth

Movie Review
Backrooms
Directed by Kane Parsons

I HAVE talked about Curry Barker’s Obsession and how his premise of the obsessed lover isn’t anything new, and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms is, if anything, even less new dressed in worldwide web clothing.

First thing that comes to mind are the mindscapes described by Stanley Kubrick late in his career (the vast red-carpeted mansion in Eyes Wide Shut; the urban ruins standing at the end of Full Metal Jacket; above all, the Overlook in The Shining with its infinite twisting corridors dotted with secretive doors, laid with a carpet of repeating geometric design dyed that maddeningly distinct burnt orange color you see in interior designs of the late 1970s and ’80s. Folks always maintained that Jack Torrance was nuts from the beginning of that film; I think that rug helped him along.)

Might mention along the way Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” where postpartum depression prompted the patriarchal husband to impose on his wife a rest cure guaranteed to make her depression worse not better. And, yes, we can trace it all to psychological roots, but when you think about it, isn’t the real reason for the woman’s eventual crackup that sickly sallow wallpaper?

Beyond that? Citizen Kane, whose digressions and interlocking flashbacks and cavernous rooms of Xanadu (the sprawling life in effect of Charles Foster Kane) Jorge Luis Borges once described as a “labyrinth with no center,” paraphrasing a line he remembered from a GK Chesterton story (“What we all dread most is a maze with no center”). Beyond even that is the strangest of children’s writers, Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), whose Alice books warned that we fall into rabbit holes and walk into looking-glasses at our peril.

And then there’s the Minotaur, a monster out of Greek mythology, wandering its labyrinth as it feeds on young men and women — and maybe the horror of his circumstance isn’t all that carnivorous munching but the sheer dreary repetitiveness of the hallways, one corner after another after another. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…

I think it actually helps in this case to know a bit of history (or as much as I can piece together, with reasonable accuracy): The Backrooms started with the photograph of an empty yellow-walled room, posted in different message boards from 2011 to 2018, then on a paranormal-themed 4chan board; in 2019 an anonymous user posted a lengthy comment that started with “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms.” The comment sprouted stories, the stories formed a fandom, the fandom created lore with differing levels and populated them with entities.

Inspired by the original image, Parson posted his first video in 2022 on YouTube; the Backrooms community resisted then adopted the videos, or at least enough members did that the video went viral, attracted enough attention to fund a film — and here we are.

Helps to know that history because it suggests the gauzy out-of-nowhere suddenness of the film’s existence; like the Backrooms wasn’t there and you turn around and suddenly it is. No explanation, and the room’s presence (and film’s atmosphere) is both new and somehow familiar, an alien space that at the same time recalls any number of images (a hallway; a wallpaper; a cavernous room; a rabbit hole; a Minotaur) in the back of your mind.

That’s it, that’s the film — except where Parsons created his images from a 3D software program for his YouTube video, production designer Danny Vermette had a budget big enough ($10 million) to actually build the rooms, 30,000-square feet worth, with walls the color of old urine; and sound designer Eugenio Battaglia managed to compose a few heard-round-the-corner noises that recall the subterranean work of Alan Splet.

That initial sense of mystery draws you in but can only do so much without a little human drama — in this case provided by Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Clark, a failed architect and failing furniture store owner who stumbles through a portal in his store basement into the Backrooms. He’s followed by his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) and in arguably the most disturbing scene in the film (WARNING: skip the rest of the article if you haven’t seen the film!) they reenact a parody of a therapy session where Mary explores the source of Clark’s — frustrations? Failures? Unhappiness? All as vaguely sketched out as the Backrooms’ backstory (for details you might want to check out Parson’s 24 mini-episodes on YouTube), only Ejiofor and Reinsve pour all the passion and commitment they can muster into that scene and make it work: you feel Mary’s horror as Clark demonstrates the difference between our reality and what, increasingly, is becoming his (“For starters, they don’t feel anything… they simply exist. Like furniture”).

Ejiofor sketches Clark’s unhappy life for us. Unspoken: could these Backrooms be his chance to reset, become the success he never managed to be? Reinsve’s Mary hides a childhood trauma that, in several ways, mimics this room where she’s in right now, tied to a chair; could she be working out issues of her own? If Parsons were a more seasoned writer we’d have some kind of compelling psychodrama playing out in these empty rooms and hallways; as is it’s the vaguely sketched parody of a psychodrama, and much of the horror and the humor derives from what we recognize of that parody (just like much of the horror and humor in Clark’s predicament derives from what we recognize of his everyday life).

At a certain point Reinsve’s Mary assumes the role of our subjective consciousness and she’s a welcome fit; she wins our sympathies. But you suspect she’s overqualified, especially if you’re familiar with her performances in Joachim Trier’s films (The Worst Person in the World, Sentimental Value) where she’s usually a multifaceted character juggling multiple traumas and needs and motives; running and screaming in a horror flick seems like relatively undemanding work by comparison.

The ending hardly feels like an ending, yet for some reason it doesn’t quite leave you unsatisfied. Why, I wonder? Perhaps because Parsons, having started with an enigma, senses he can’t afford to end with anything but another enigma — he has to pivot to an even bigger mystery because he has so much more to tell, which may be a cop-out, may be not; depends on how you feel about the film so far. I like it; I feel I got my money’s worth, but can’t predict how another viewer might react. I do know I like that final image — in a way it’s like a Mandelbrot set — the further you pull out the more things remain the same, an ever-corrugating image repeated again and again in endless iteration like (when you think about it) a labyrinth with no center.