Twenty-year-old Kane Parsons made his directorial debut as A24’s youngest director with his movie “Backrooms,” released on May 29.
Parsons joins a cast of directors who find their origins on YouTube. “Obsession,” released earlier this month, was directed by Curry Barker, after finding success with his short film “The Chair” on YouTube. Mark Fischbach, better known as Markiplier, released “Iron Lung” in January, a movie he both directed and starred in.
The film “Backrooms” is a new installment in a web series Parsons debuted on YouTube in January 2022. The web series itself was inspired by a creepypasta — a kind of internet ghost story — of a fictional endless space that can be traced back to 2019.
Although the film is set in the same reality as the YouTube series, familiarity with the series is not necessary to enjoy the film.
The series mostly focuses on the operations of the ASYNC lab, the shady corporation researching the backrooms. The film, however, revolves around two characters: Clark — played by Chiwetel Ejiofor — a failed architect who can’t even keep his marriage on stable ground; and Mary — played by Renate Reinsve — a therapist who struggles with her relationship with her mother.
While the original web series was created through Parsons’ use of free visual effects software Blender, the film offers a grander production scale. Boasting a 30,000-square-foot set, the imagined space became quite real.
And this investment paid off. By far, the crowning achievement of “Backrooms” is its atmosphere.
The sickly yellow halls of the backrooms’ distorted architecture capture a sense of uncanniness that instantly triggers unease, further exemplified by an eerie ambient soundtrack created by Parsons in collaboration with composer Edo Van Breemen.
Watching the film’s characters traverse the liminal spaces calls back to the feeling of exploring somewhere you weren’t supposed to be as a child, a blend of curiosity and fear. “Backrooms” is at its scariest when nothing is happening at all — but it feels like something should be.
The film further leans into uncanniness by providing one of our first real looks at the backrooms’ inhabitants, in contrast to the series’ brief glimpses.
While I found some of the creature designs extremely unnerving and unique, I was disappointed to see the film’s main antagonistic creature had the most underwhelming design by far. It was reminiscent of tropes found in other internet horror media like Slenderman.
Disappointingly, the film’s weakest part is its climax, which abandons much of its foreboding atmosphere to devolve into a monster chase sequence — a cliched end to an otherwise extremely unique film.
Considering the film’s internet origins, the format comes into question. The main change from making the leap from YouTube to the cinema is framing.
On YouTube, the web series had a unique quality to it. Clicking through the archival installments of the web series lent the project a rabbit-hole feeling, as if you were uncovering the mysteries of the backrooms by piecing together this shady anthology.
While the film still offers some analog segments, the majority of it is shot like any other horror movie, demystifying the liminal space.
But the film offers something the web series does not: the opportunity to develop more fleshed-out characters. Dialogue in the original series was sparse, and where it was present, it was almost always in discussion of the backrooms themselves. By developing the two leads, the film offers more to say than the original series.
The film also attempts to offer some cultural critique, brushing against ideas like the loss of a sense of place and rampant consumerism that characterized the end of the 20th century. However, none of these ideas are meaningfully fleshed out; instead, the film wastes screentime documenting the backrooms’ endless halls.
Unfortunately, neither the themes nor the characters are given much room for exploration. The most characterization we get is during the film’s therapy scenes, where the dialogue can feel a little forced. The ending of Reinsve’s character fell especially flat.
Ultimately, “Backrooms” is an exciting directorial debut from one of the industry’s youngest creatives. While it can fall into some common tropes, the film offers enough unique aspects to keep me excited for Parsons’ next work.
If you’re looking for a horror movie that doesn’t feel like the rest, consider giving “Backrooms” a watch.
Contact Christopher Rodriguez at crodriguez@alligator.org. Follow him on X @ChrisRodri29386.
