Backrooms Review

Film is in an interesting place right now. There are simultaneously more areas of neglect and love with the medium of film than ever before. In terms of neglect, well, the general public has seemingly gotten less interested in movies as a basic pastime. A combination of the ever-growing costs of going to the theaters and streaming fracturing potential audiences has resulted in fewer films making a huge impact. Not to mention how the broader culture is more stretched out and less centralized due to social media and streaming isolating and wearing out trends quickly. Franchises mostly exist in the Aether, and people aren’t as excited about them anymore as a collective. However, for others, movies have become a more important element of culture than ever. The combination of younger generations becoming more explorative with what they watch and having a wider perception and appreciation of films has created a new type of audience, which, while smaller than the usual type, is very passionate. A keen eye for film curation and research has been helped by how social media has made it easier to access and discuss film. With this in mind, it is interesting to view the current state of what is out in theaters and how it reflects this duality. On the one hand, you have The Mandalorian and Grogu. A film that is basically an extended episode of a streaming TV show and feels like the embodiment of all the complaints and burnout audiences have with franchises right now. However, on the other hand, we have Backrooms.

This is a movie directed by YouTuber Kane Parsons and is his first feature film. He has become well known for his many series of horror shorts on his YouTube channel, with Backrooms being the most famous. The focus is on bringing to life an urban legend of never-ending liminal spaces, empty areas that feel uncanny, that originated in online circles. It caught the eye of A24, and at 20 years old, Kane is the youngest director to have a #1 film at the box office. What is fascinating, however, is not just that this is a runaway success by a really young director who shows a lot of promise, but also what it represents in terms of what said success means for movies in general

The film is a simple one in premise. It follows a man named Clark and his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline. Clark is a failed architect who is recently divorced and is stuck running a low-quality furniture store. He confides in Kline to help find a path forward for himself. One night, he finds an odd sliver of light in the wall and finds that he can walk through it into a never-ending labyrinth of fluorescent rooms. He becomes fixated on this anomaly, and Kline ends up looking for him after he disappears. This leads to something much more horrifying and a potential conspiracy regarding this place.

The presentation of the concept of the backrooms has always been its main draw, and it’s good to note that the art direction and direction in the film representing the location are top-notch. The fact that Kane Parsons is 20 makes it amazing that such a confident and well-realized film is his first. While it is likely he got help from the many directors who produced the film, he was the driving force and is very insightful about how he wanted to approach the project and how he views filmmaking in general. The backrooms have always been an unsettling concept. Just this place that uses familiarity to create an off-putting feeling with having things strewn about in areas that don’t fit. Not only that, but it’s a concept that’s distinctly of this generation. People in their 20s live in the post-COVID world, where so many areas of culture, economy, and recreation have been abandoned and are left standing. The concepts of liminal spaces tie into the unnatural feeling one gets seeing something abandoned and empty, which feels more common in real life, day-to-day. Just look at industries in the Midwest or malls in suburban America, where once bustling elements of the average American lifestyle are just sitting there in empty silence. Not only that, but considering how fractured broad culture is and how many prior things that have been around for decades are being propped up constantly in a state of living dead for nostalgia, the ideas of liminal spaces can also be seen as a metaphor of said decay of familiar culture into something that only barely resembles it over time. Just repeating endlessly until it becomes a hollow echo of itself with no real way to navigate out of it. Backrooms plays into this unsettling feeling not just in the concept, but in the broad strokes of its themes and filmmaking as well.

The thing I appreciate the most about this movie is that it takes its time with its dread. There are long moments simply focusing on silence and the exploration of the backrooms, which just lets the environment overtake all. Just letting the unsettling vibes or the slow dread of exploring the place is a far better approach than relying on jump scares or giant monsters constantly chasing people. The effective use of negative space, wide shots, and angles makes the rooms seem even more empty and imposing. Even outside of the rooms, similar shots are used to make the real world as unnerving due to it being at a distance or in odd framing. Clark’s furniture store is always shown in wide shots in a vacant parking lot with few tenants nearby, which resembles a half-dead outdoor mall. The inside has a scattered layout and a random downstairs section that feels as off-putting as the backrooms, where product is just placed around a random layout without much correlation, like it’s an out-of-place tenant in a dying mall. These choices not only make the regular environments feel as off-putting as the backrooms, but push the liminal spaces’ aesthetics further. While there is a reveal of something within the backrooms, which does feel a bit more traditionally scary, it does a good job of tying into the characters and ideas that the themes and the main location bring up, as well as being well executed.

The thing that I liked the most, though, was how the backrooms were not only used effectively as horror and aesthetic, but also as something to project themes and metaphors onto, and not just in the aforementioned way of how liminal spaces connect with younger perspectives of decaying culture. By the end, there’s a genuinely fascinating way the film connects the characters and the backrooms by showing it as a representation of their psyches. Clark and Kline’s mentalities regarding their past are embodied by how they either misremember or repress the whole truth in pieces. Clark is an individual who is repressing his own flaws and refuses to acknowledge change or self-fault, and isn’t wholly truthful about his issues either. Kline is haunted by her trauma from her youth and uses her career as a therapist to sift through that, despite it repressing more than anything. The backrooms are both the physical representation of this and bring out the characters’ inner selves more openly. Not only that, but the way the backrooms are almost a flawed copy of things in the real world ties into how the characters, and by extension many of us, observe certain things about ourselves in muddled ways, either intentionally or in a natural sense. There will always be things that only exist in the mind as vague things due to the passage of time, and visualizing that is a bit unsettling.

I do have to note the most effective sequence of horror, though, and that is the found footage scene. It involves Clark taking his two store employees and a camera to further explore the rooms, and basically, everything goes wrong. The camera work is top-notch and does feel more like a traditional horror film, similar to the reveal at the end, but executed extremely well. The ways the backrooms change frantically as Clark tries to run from what is stalking him, alongside how so much is done with so little, make the tension escalate highly. One scene in particular, where one employee sees Clark through glass, but Clark only sees a wall on his end, is particularly unsettling, as is the reveal of a creature within the rooms.

In regard to the performance of the film, though, while I expected some momentum due to the online following of the series and the overall concept connecting with younger audiences, I am surprised at just how big it is. Not only being one of the highest opening horror films domestically, but being the biggest opening for A24, and gave Parsons the title of youngest director to helm a film that went to number one. The fact that this and Obsession, another horror film made by a young talent who started on YouTube, have exploded at the box office while The Mandalorian and Grogu have underperformed with one of the lowest openings of their franchise tells me a lot about what the current state of films is and what the future direction may be.

The popular films of the past decade have fallen out of favor with the general public, and many aren’t sure about the future direction of what movies need to be. Rather than simply relying on the studio system or the brands and IP’s that have been around for decades, audiences want new ideas that speak to their sensibilities and perceptions. While not every element of newer movies, such as this and Obsession, is going to be 100% original, they feel like movies made by people with a younger mentality and more observant perceptions about the state of the world and their place in it. They won’t take over the world compared to the dominance of franchises in the past decade, per se, but there is an untapped audience waiting for them regardless. The fact that Backrooms can be interpreted in so many ways, either as how it directly focuses on psychology or can be interpreted as a commentary on culture or nostalgia, is something far more insightful and different compared to the basic monster movie someone much older would have done with the concept. Does this mean a wholesale shift in movies? Probably not. Spiderman, Toy Story 5, and (GROAN) the Moana remake will probably pass a billion each, so we aren’t out of the IP mines yet. That, and I do feel that while horror is a great way for new talent to cut their teeth due to its long-term adaptability and staying power as a genre, we do need to see a wider variety in genres that come from this area of young filmmakers from this generation as well. Even so, we need a new type of voice to make our movies. This period has some similar feelings to the 70s in being one where reliable films are starting to lose influence and younger talent is coming out of the woodwork to try new things more consistently. New developments and experimentation happen with every generation, and given how much of a transitional period for film this is, we might see many interesting new filmmakers come out to make an impact very soon. Hopefully, films like Backrooms represent the next steps in the direction of movies in general.