Backrooms, an addition to the growing list of self-consciously inventive horror movies, arrives with a pedigree that may impress aficionados. Produced by horror masters James Wan and Osgood Perkins, the movie also features performances by actors with hefty resumes: Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve.
A bit about the movie's background: It springs from a movement called "creepypasta,'' i.e., horror stories posted and shared on the internet. Director Kane Parsons, now 20, began uploading Backrooms episodes in 2022, expanding a previous "creepypasta" concept into 22 short films.
I learned this from Googling and had no exposure to Backrooms before I saw Parsons' movie. I say this because Parsons' movie may have more appeal to those familiar with his online work than I am.
On one hand, Backrooms can be seen as a creative immersion in a liminal world composed of endless rooms. Liminal worlds, by the way, are currently big in horror, bland, sometimes transitional locations that resonate with eerie emptiness.
Set during the 1990s, Backrooms slips easily into its off-kilter tale, partly because of the aural atmosphere the film creates, a mixture of unintelligible voices and synth music by Edo Van Breemen and Parsons.
The movie has a story of sorts, which Parsons shows us is being watched by ill-defined researchers, a conceit that adds more cause for apprehension.
Ejiofor plays Clark, a furniture store owner whose life is headed in the wrong direction. His wife recently left him, and Clark has been unable to launch his desired career as an architect.
To get on the right track, Clark visits Mary (Reinsve), a therapist he hopes will open new doors for him. She's written a book conveniently titled The Window Within.
Displaced from his home, Clark has been relegated to sleeping in his store. He also appears as a peg-legged pirate in awful commercials made by one of his employees (Finn Bennett). We never see any customers in Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire, one more ploy that augments the sense of vacancy that permeates Backrooms -- absence that's meant to be felt.
When Clark discovers a portal in the store's basement, he enters a weird alternate reality. Upon returning to "normal," he shares his discovery with his therapist, who probably thinks he's delusional.
To convince a skeptical Mary that his experience was "real," Clark convinces Bennett's Bobby and another employee (Lukita Maxwell) to pass through the portal with him. Clark wants Bobby to film their trippy experience so that he can prove the existence of the rooms that both frighten and attract him.
It doesn't take long for Mary to visit the store, find the portal, and enter the weird dimension in which Clark has lost himself.
Working from a screenplay by Will Soodik, Parsons includes flashbacks to Mary's childhood with a paranoid mother. Her childhood home was demolished by developers leaving only a shard, a handprint she saved from the rubble of a concrete driveway. It will come in handy.
Parsons offers a variety of surreal sights: piles of discarded furniture, a stop sign with the word "stop" spelled backwards, and glimpses of figures who make us suspect that the place is occupied and dangerous.
Parsons excels at alternate-reality building: rooms full of wall-to-wall carpeting and yellow walls, and, eventually, figures with distorted features. Are we seeing funhouse reflections of the reality of Clark and Mary's lives? Maybe.
Not surprisingly, we're primed for the big reveal that will make sense of everything we've been watching. The movie, which functions as an inventive tease, has little interest in tidying up after itself, offering only the notion that we trap ourselves in behaviors we keep repeating, no matter how many times they lead us nowhere.
Neither Ejiofor nor Reinsve has much to develop. Mostly, they react to the movie's increasingly alienating atmospherics. Mark Duplass turns up in a role that seems as if it's going to provide the explanation we've been waiting for, but his character doesn't seem to know much about what's happening, either.
Blood and gore are in short supply, and some of the movie's twisted jokes, expressionless human figures whose insides can be scooped out and eaten, feel as if they've popped out of nowhere.
There's talent on display in Backrooms, notably Danny Vermette's creative production design, but the found-footage quality and art-horror atmospherics only take the movie so far. Ambiguity isn't a fatal flaw, but Backrooms begins to feel repetitive as it crawls inside our heads.
Backrooms works like a maze. Homes and offices are creepy. Lives are empty. Something's always missing. Some will find all this intriguing. Others may just want out.
My reaction was mixed. I appreciated Parsons' willingness to experiment and was disappointed that the characters often play second fiddle to so many half-baked ideas that suggest more than the film is able (or perhaps willing) to realize.
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