Released: 28th May
Seen: 24th October
It all started with a single image posted to a forum in 2019. 4Chan, a site with a controversial reputation (to put it kindly), had a paranormal forum, and one day someone posted a single image. This image
This simple image of a strange set of rooms with mismatched off-yellow wallpaper and a carpet that looks like it’s made friends with every incontinent animal on the planet became known as The Backrooms, a piece of internet folklore (AKA A creepypasta) that soon took on a life of its own. It began as a series of stories, people making up an elaborate history for this world until a young filmmaker named Kane Parsons made a YouTube video that imagined what would happen if someone with a camera got lost in the Backrooms and something was coming after them. These became so popular that it was seemingly inevitable that they would lead to a movie being made about this liminal space; what was less inevitable was that the film would actually be good.
Backrooms largely revolves around Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a former architect, current furniture store owner and alcoholic who is slowly destroying his marriage with his behaviour. One day, while seemingly living at his furniture store, Clark notices a strange slit in one of the walls that emits a light from an impossible location. Upon inspection of the slit, he slips through the wall and into a strange area that looks similar enough to the store he was in, only everything is a little off. It seems to go on forever, and the more he explores, the weirder everything gets. Eventually, he manages to bring in several other people to help him investigate these backrooms, including his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve), who is trying to deal with some trauma of her own. Going through the backrooms is not only strange and confusing, it might be dangerous because who knows what strange creatures live in this seemingly endless space.
One thing that must be said about Backrooms is that it’s a surprisingly confident film. Kane Parsons has spent so long in this strange world thanks to his YouTube videos that he knows exactly how this world should be presented, and you can feel that knowledge through the screen. Even when things look their most random, when sets appear thrown together to look weird, you can tell it’s such a careful, deliberate choice where everything is just exactly how the filmmaker wants it. It’s so intentional that you can’t help but be pulled completely into this world; every single choice just makes it feel so rich and larger than you ever see. Within just a few seconds of seeing the titular Backrooms, you can’t help but feel that it’s going to go on forever, that there is no end to those yellow halls, and it makes everything so much more unnerving.
Backrooms is kind of masterful at giving the audience that “oh shit” feeling, that specific moment in every horror film where you just stare at an empty room and see something moving in the shadows or at a doorway, and you can’t quite see it but you know it’s not gonna be good, so you go “oh shit” and then want to run. Backrooms does that all the time, and it’s effective every single time. Because of the sheer scope of everything, it’s so easy to imagine what weird horror is about to get through the door; your imagination carries so many of the bigger scare moments of the film. It plays around with the uncanny valley of everything so well that you’re always a little on edge, something is just off, and that’s where a lot of the tension comes from. You know something here is fucked up, you know that whatever made a world like this can’t possibly be human and so when something moves that shouldn’t be moving, it makes the hair on your neck stand up.
It’s also really impressive how the film can bounce between found footage (like the YouTube shorts) and your standard cinematography and still maintain that eerie, unnatural sensation that the found footage style really helps elevate. Found footage hides the flaws so much better than HD cameras do, but here they manage to both work really well in making things feel so strange and unknowable. It’s really a testament to the people behind the camera who manage to know just when to jump between styles and how to blend both of them in a way that keeps the tension going. It makes for some strange imagery that no other film has really managed to pull off, and a lot of it is practical, which really helps make this strange world feel so much more real. You can see the lead performers physically climbing up the walls to try and find their way around, you can almost feel the tight spaces closing in as characters try to make it through seemingly shrinking pathways; it just helps make everything that much better.
What also helps, and indeed does a bulk of the work in making this more than an exploration of nightmarish architecture, is the two lead performers who manage to carry the film on their backs like it was nothing. In particular, Chiwetel Ejiofor manages to make a completely unlikable character somehow endlessly fascinating; watching his slow descent into madness throughout the course of the film and how he just seems locked into being the absolute worst person possible is strangely compelling (provided you can tolerate following such an unlikable lead, which I understand is not something everyone can really do). Renate Reinsve also does pretty well with her moments, particularly towards the end when she essentially takes over the film, but she gets a lot less meat to work with when compared to Chiwetel, he gets to have some of the most intense moments in the movie and she has to sell running away from a demented pirate… it’s still impressive, it’s just very different.
Speaking of that demented pirate, perhaps the big thing that keeps Backrooms from being perfect is that it really just can’t help but overindulge. Scenes go on for so much longer than they have to, pauses feel like they just go on for no particular reason or the camera will look in the same spot 3-4 times just to make sure we saw there was nothing there. It’s all intentional, you can feel that in every second, but there are so many more seconds than there needs to be so it can be easy to just drift off. This is especially problematic at the end when things are meant to ratchet up more and more and then, for some reason, we slow to almost a complete standstill. There are times when the slow pacing does help the film, it acts as a buildup that grows slowly over the course of a full scene but there are also times when the slow pacing just feels like it’s there because the film is all about this weird ambient horror and doesn’t really do anything. At two hours long, there’s a point where this film gets to be too much of a blank space and, oddly enough, that can make it easy to lose interest in certain parts.
For most of the time though, Backrooms is a strange creative horror film that plays with the uncanny valley in ways that few other films have managed to pull off properly. It might be the first film based on an internet creepypasta that doesn’t completely suck (Hi Slender Man, I still haven’t forgotten how dull you were!), which in itself is quite impressive. It’s well performed and has enough great visuals to get most people to pay attention. That’s not to say it’s for everyone, if a slow-moving horror based around ambience and strange liminal spaces sounds like it’s not going to work for you then this probably won’t change that opinion. If you’re curious enough to give it a shot, there’s a strong chance that Backrooms is going to pull you in and keep you lost within its strange world for a very long time.
