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DIRECTED BY: Kane Parsons

FEATURING:Renate Reinsve, Chiwetel Ejiofor,

PLOT: A frustrated furniture-store owner discovers a seemingly infinite maze of mysterious rooms in the back of his store, and invites his therapist to help explore them.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Explore the labyrinths of the unconscious in this ambiguous and terrifying psychological horror.

COMMENTS: Clark is a frustrated, divorced wannabe architect barely making ends meet at his crappy furniture store. He drinks too much and is unhappy enough that he goes to see a therapist, Mary, to vent and role-play his breakup with his wife. While investigating an electricity bill that’s much higher than it should be, Clark discovers he can pass through a wall in his basement to enter a maze of backrooms filled with odd phenomena. Mary is skeptical when he tells her of his explorations, but when he fails to show up at a weekly session, she follows him into the backrooms.

Thirty-something furniture salesmen and female psychologists do not seem like the kind of protagonists 20-year old director Kane Parsons would pick to pilot his feature debut film, but herein lies Backrooms‘ genius. Parson wisely outsourced his script to television writer Will Soodik. Soodik delivers an unexpectedly rich scenario that pries into Clark’s insecurities and Mary’s traumatic backstory without fully explaining them, leaving Parsons free to expend his youthful creativity on designing the rooms themselves. The film’s interlocking chambers feature improbable geometries, optical illusions, out-of-place objects like heaps of stacked furniture, piles of laundry, dead birds, sneakers half-submerged in the floor, and so on. The deeper we penetrate into the maze, the more surreal the objects we find—and eventually, people (of a sort) show up. Everything is built wrong, as if misremembered or imagined by an alien intelligence trying to recreate human artifacts based on a stock photo image library, with little understanding of the ways objects actually relate to each other in the physical world. The constructs recall the uncanny, too-many-fingered visions that AI regurgitated only a few years ago. How and why were these created, by whom and for what purpose? The indeterminate grotesqueness of Backrooms simulacra gives the film uncanny power; the resonance with its characters’ psychological flaws imbues it with meaning.

There are two potential pitfalls with Backrooms. The first is the expectations set by locating the film within the horror genre. Backrooms is at its best when dwelling within its own unease: it does not need (many) monsters, stalkers, jump scares, or scenes of bloodletting to liven it up. These elements do show up, but miraculously, the story survives its chase scenes, ending by circling back to its inexplicable roots. A looming issue, however, may be the audience’s insatiable thirst for “lore,” which, if improperly indulged, can lead to the biggest buzzkill of all: “explication.” Backrooms 2 probably would be—and, I strongly fear will be—a terrible idea. As a standalone work, Backrooms beautifully expands upon the promising but narrow premise of the original shorts, adding depth and forming an ambiguously closed circle. Please, don’t push your luck. At the tender age of age 20, Parsons should still have decades of completely original nightmares to dredge up from his fertile unconscious.

Audience notes: The theater was fairly full for a weekday evening showing in the expensive “Xtreme” format. There were no walkouts (with one exception I’ll mention at the end). There were more teenagers there than I expected, sitting in the front rows for an immersive experience, to boot; I should have been able to predict this knowing of Parson’s YouTube audience, but it still surprised me. One parent brought two boys, estimated ages 7-11. The younger got scared in the middle of the film (during a scene where they discover a Christmas tree in a red-lit room) and his mom had to escort him out (I don’t know if he returned later). The older boy was heard to exclaim “that was scary and weird!” when it was all over. I’m considering adoption.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It is ambitious, eerie, frustrating, hypnotic, and deeply weird, a film that would rather haunt the edges of your understanding than hand you a map.”–Doug Jamieson, The Jam Report (contemporaneous)