I finally made it to the theater to catch Backrooms, the new psychological horror film by YouTube sensation Kane Parsons (who at age 20 is younger than the platform itself), based on his own Backrooms (Found Footage) series. Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, this fascinating, atmospheric thriller is set in 1990s California, where a furniture store owner discovers a seemingly endless maze of hidden passages attached to the store's basement. As he obsessively explores the space, weirder and weirder things happen. If you've read and enjoyed the 2000 novel House of Leaves, you'll be enthralled by this movie.
And that's about all you should really know going into this. Alright maybe a little bit more. The store owner Clark is an alcoholic and a failed architect (and his store is on the verge of going under as well), currently on the outs with his wife (He sleeps in one of the showroom beds since he can't go home). His therapist Mary tries to help him move on from his failures and embrace a new path forward, and maybe take some responsibility for how his life is turning out. The script devises a clever method for conveying this exposition, by showing a therapy session where Mary gets Clark to roleplay the last conversation he had with his wife. Ejiofor and Reinsve are such capable actors they make what could've been an on-the-nose info dump feel natural and compelling, and the characters' emotional stakes lend the film much more weight than your run-of-the-mill haunted house movie.
The fantastical horror elements are also handled with subtlety and discipline. We get several long stretches where Clark and others are simply wandering around these brightly lit, yellow-hued liminal spaces trying to figure them out, as the tension and dread keep piling on. And the film doesn't rely on jump scares to let the audience off the hook (though there is one that got me). Perhaps even more effective are the passages where we view the events through a character's video camera; what is it about low-res VHS tape that makes creepy spaces that much creepier?
Kane Parsons has said he wants to make further Backrooms films and web shows, and I'm definitely interested to see what else he does with this material. At age 20 he's already demonstrated a prodigious acumen for constructing a film in a way that plays against audience expectations; Backrooms could've easily fallen into several hackneyed traps in the hands of a lesser director but Parsons avoids them. Instead of mindless haunted house tropes, this otherworldly concept plays off real human traumas and psychological hangups we can all relate to. There's also an argument to be made that the film is a statement on the use of AI. Consider the analogy one character introduces: "If you described a dog to a person who's never seen a dog and then asked them to draw a picture of it, they'd get some details right but something would be off." Isn't that AI to a tee? Get ready for an unnerving slide into the Uncanny Valley....
I kinda loved Backrooms and may go back and check out the YouTube series now. I look forward to adding this movie to my Halloweentime roster. It's fantastic to see small, personal films making such a killing at the box office; a weaning off of overpriced, overproduced, established IP movies is exactly what the film industry needs right now. Don't get me wrong, I'm still seeing Toy Story 5, Supergirl and Spider-Man: Brave New World at the cinema, but it's great to see young audiences opting for movies like this one.
I give Backrooms ***1/2 out of ****.
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