Review: BACKROOMS

Clark's not doing so well. His separation is grinding and his furniture business is winding down. In therapy, he complains about roleplay but returns to his anger with his wife as though he's still possessed by it. His shrink, Mary, is patient and quite indulgent but seems to be making little progress. One night (having been kicked out of home, he's sleeping in one the beds he hopes to sell), he notices the electrics going nuts again and, investigating, he spies a weird phenomenon: a thin line of light appears to be leaking through a wall that should have nothing behind it. He approaches it and falls right through it. On the other side is a huge yellow room with a messy stack of furniture and doors that lead to the same yellow carpet and wallpaper, a labyrinth of corridors and rooms variously empty or furished with sunken couches and tables that poke out halway from the walls. It seems endless. Welcome to the backrooms.

Clark reports this to Mary and describes it thus: imagine telling someone who has never seen a dog what it looks like and asking them to draw the description. Good analogy. One room might have a table and lamp and a series of decreasingly sized repeats. There could be a room with a pool. If you look up you might see long vents with tiny doorways that would open onto voids. If you see a figure in the distance think twice about greeting it; it could be a cutout with a radio or something animate and lethal.

Kane Parsons, director, did not create the Backrooms (nor claims such), they began as a photo of an anonymous yellow wallpapered corridor in 2019 on 4chan. Another 4chan-er responded:

"If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in

God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you"

This engendered a long and rich collective world building which appeared to describe the same infinity with added lore. Parsons, under his YouTube handle Kane Pixels, produced a series of situational and historical videos which, while not quite telling a story, follow a thread of discovery and investigation. His confident work caught the eye of the likes of James Wan and A24 and there it was this morning in front of me in a well stocked cinema.

As this is a feature film, a central narrative was struck in preference to the discontinuous episodic structure of Parsons' web series. This was what worried anyone familiar with at least the series. Would it get Hollywoodised? Well, it has been but tastefully. We get characters with motivations that lead us into the dreamlike claustrophobic setting and a progress through a conflict that is hampered by the unsettlingly dynamic realm.

Beyond that, Hollywood is left at the door and it's up to the audience to follow who, given just enough, will deliver the rest around the characters. The audience was a little fidgety which annoyed me through the ads (when they're allowed to be fidgety) but everyone shut up and paid attention at the prologue scene. Note to filmmakers who intend their work be shown in cinemas: start, Homer could have told you, in a crisis and add some conversation punching noise. You've got 'em.

I remember planning a joke for this review, considering the presence of a psychiatrist, that maybe this was what Jung's collective unconscious really is, the manufactured garbage of all of humanity, sinking into the floor of bland yellow office space. But the film kind of beat me to it as it progressed. Then, afterwards, when I went to do some shopping, the crowds and modern brutal architecture of the shopping centre felt like a VR experience augmenting the movie. 

When we see the outside world, we look at street scenes flattened by a long lens, rows upon rows of housing development boxes. Are we guilty, here? Are we dreaming this terrifying, smothering space into existance just form the way we expect to live? If the backrooms form a hell it is more like the one in Hellraiser than the Inferno, containg no sense of justice beyond the ill chance of its discovery.

If you were curious about whether to see the YouTube series first, I'd advise against it. Go in as uninformed as the characters in this film. Then, try the series for at least Parsons' background. As the story in this movie is just one slice of the possible lore, sequels are almost inevitable and I'd see them all if they only sought to explore different slices.

Oh, there has been scuttlebutt about Parson's getting assistance in his direction. He was twenty when this film was finished. He was a teenager when he made the web series. Anyone who doubts this age range is capable of this kind of work should try to remember for themselves. At twenty, you can be sitting on a tram and conjuring worlds. It's not the age of the artist but the art in the daydreamer, and there's plenty here.