Sinister Backrooms Journeys into Unexplainable Pockets of Encroaching Dread
Something beyond rational explanation is going on at Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a struggling furniture company located just outside the suburbs of Silicon Valley. Cranky owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers a hidden doorway to a surreal nowhere in the basement showroom of his business. It opens to a blasé office space of yellowish tan hallways, flickering fluorescent lights, and empty rooms, all of which seem to be in continual flux. The place is a massive maze that’s as peculiar as it is unsettling, and Clark is immediately consumed with the desire to learn more about this place and its unhinged secrets, even if doing so might lead to his doom.
Based on his 24-episode viral web series The Backrooms, director Kane Parsons both streamlines and expands his spectacularly popular creepypasta for the big screen with his feature-length debut, Backrooms. Bringing in writer Will Soodik to pen the screenplay (he cut his teeth on cutting-edge television series like Homeland, Westworld, and Ash vs Evil Dead), the 20-year-old filmmaker has crafted an undeniably eerie and unnerving sensory enigma. Parsons’s film is a dynamic WTF spellbinder that isn’t interested in providing straightforward answers to any of its questions. It doesn’t want to make the viewer comfortable. That’s not on the agenda.
The journey is what is important, not the destination. And if none of what happens makes a lick of sense? Parsons is perfectly okay with that, too. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s the idea.
Those expecting anything approaching a rational, character-driven narrative will be sorely disappointed. Clark is a construct, a man made up of various masculine stereotypes that fuel his basic insecurities and make him especially susceptible to falling deeper and deeper under the insidious spell of the backrooms. But that does not mean neither Parsons nor Soodik doesn’t give the character a strong, universally recognizable emotional foundation; it’s what all of this perversely abnormal nonsense is built on.
Clark’s pain (his wife recently kicked him out of the house, his dreams of being a successful architect have collapsed, and his business is on the verge of bankruptcy) is real. So are his resentment of society and his crippling self-loathing. It’s no wonder this man would be immediately willing to get lost in the mystery that’s literally on the other side of the wall of his store. Watching him devolve the more he learns about the place and begins to become one with its cryptically unfinished, M. C. Escher meets Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired meanderings is particularly disconcerting, especially as his journey inches ever closer to its preordained conclusion.
I couldn’t take my eyes off Ejiofor. His face contorts with beauteous agony as he fails to explain what it is Clark has found to his costar, Renate Reinsve (delivering a lithe, delicately balanced performance as the business owner’s incredulous psychiatrist, Mary). His joy, his dread, his excitement, his befuddlement; this all comes through with unhinged precision. The actor has a way of amplifying the film’s omnipresent sensation of anxiety simply with the slight quiver of a lip or the inexact raising of an eyebrow. His level of physical and emotional control is astonishing.
Parsons is admittedly much better at creating a mood and at conjuring up phantasmagoric imagery than he is at producing sensations of pure, unadulterated terror. And, while comparisons to the early works of David Lynch or David Cronenberg are unavoidable, the director doesn’t quite have their knack at making style and sensation still feel substantive all on their own. Films like Blue Velvet or The Brood didn’t require coherent storytelling (let alone plausible answers to their questions) to make a lasting impression, and Parsons, for all his talent, isn’t quite at their level as of yet — but I do think he’ll hopefully get there.
Still, while the last act isn’t much more than a well-staged chase sequence with a lone survivor desperately trying to find their way out of this never-ending maze before getting ripped to shreds by a peg-legged ogre, Backrooms remains a stylish and imaginative jolt of malevolent weirdness that got under my skin. Ejiofor is masterful as Clark, and Parsons showcases an impressive visual and stylistic panache that should only grow with each subsequent film.
Even if the web series this slice of encroaching horror is born from was made to flicker on a laptop in the wee hours of the morning, do not wait to watch this online. See it in the theater and then revel in the unhinged nightmares it will giddily spawn for several nights afterward.
Film Rating: 3 (out of 4)
