Backrooms

The debut film from 20-year-old director examines memory, reality and fear after Chiwetel Ejiofor accesses an infinite series of hidden rooms that all feel creepily askew. A startlingly assured feature debut from director Kane Parsons, Backrooms bends the liminal spaces that have haunted the internet for years into a horror film that’s as mesmerizing as it is terrifying. Powered by a magnetic cast, Backrooms may oscillate between atmospheric allure and oneiric disorientation, but Kanepixels’ spell remains undeniable.

Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve give barnstormingly good performances as Clark and Mary; it is the early 90s and Clark is a failed architect, separated from his wife, and an alcoholic who to make ends meet self-hatingly manages a drearily and eerily vast discount furniture store, called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. He does dumb TV ads dressed as a pirate while uneasily aware he should be a sultan to make the “Ottoman empire” pun work. He goes to see a therapist, Mary, a sad, gentle person who markets her own self-help audio tapes and is haunted by childhood memories of her abusive mother.

Halfway through this horror hit, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) explains the concept of Backrooms by saying it’s like describing a dog to someone and then asking them to draw it. They’d get the basics right, but the details would be off. And probably in a deeply unsettling way. This “imagined dog” manifests itself in Kane Parsons’ highly anticipated film, one based on the creepypasta that spawned his own YouTube series and clearly inspired by everything from the never-ending hallways of “Severance” to The Black Lodge in “Twin Peaks.” With its effective visual language and strongly directed performances, “Backrooms” is more promising than anything else, a sign of what could be built within this subgenre and what its creator could make in the future.

To say Clark is in a rut would be an understatement. In 1990, Santa Clara, Clark manages a furniture store with a mascot that’s kind of a pirate and kind of a sultan, but definitely has no customers. He’s sleeping at the store, drinking straight from the bottle, and complaining to his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), about just about everything. He’s one of those guys who blames everyone but himself for the life rut in which he resides; he spends most of his sessions complaining about his ex-wife. An underdeveloped root of Will Soodik’s screenplay is that Clark, like so many people, is already stuck in his own never-ending liminal space, not really living but not dead either.

Backrooms is a deeply weird, tremendously effective piece of filmmaking, a visual representation of the fractured modern mind and the intense pressure we all find ourselves under each and every day. Director Kane Parsons plays with perspective and point of view in a way that keeps the audience and the film’s characters alike off-balance, never letting us (or them) settle into one specific mode of terror.