Review: Backrooms

 

As a viral YouTube hit with multiple videos and a growing amount of lore, “The Backrooms” was an obvious candidate for the big screen. Well, obvious until you stopped to think about it. How are you going to make a successful movie out of creeping people out by slowly wandering around a bizarre maze that’s mostly just a weird take on the service areas hidden from the public at stadiums and hotels?

“Add characters” is the obvious answer, even if it threatens to defuse the atmosphere the series relies on. Fortunately, Clarke (Chiweltel Ejiofor) has a lot going on even before things get spooky. A former architect now running a half empty furniture warehouse (where he also lives), his sessions with therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) reveal a man filled with anger who sees being alone as his natural state.

After a spate of strange electrical issues at the store, he discovers a… weak spot in the wall, which he can pass through and enter a sodium-lit mirror of the real world, filled with items sinking into the floor and walls that don’t make sense. It’s strange, but nothing more than that, right?

Oh wait, right at the start of the film we saw a found footage sequence involving someone in a biohazard suit hurrying through the same creepy location, only he was scared out of his wits that something bad was going to happen. And then it did. There’s something roaming the backrooms and it doesn’t seem friendly.

The horror here is balanced between a bunch of jump scares and chase sequences in the backrooms - all effectively handled by first time director Kane Parsons (creator of the original YouTube shorts) - and the wider mystery of what might be going on in an endless space that seems to clumsily mimic the memories of those who stumble into it.

The unsettling vibe of endless bland corridors and rooms is what makes the concept work, and this fits enough of that in to keep things faithful while building on the concept just enough to make it satisfying as a stand alone film. Are the backrooms a reflection of the recesses of our mind? Or some place trying to copy and replace reality itself? Maybe it’s neither, or both, or something else.

For those who have been following the YouTube saga, you’re not left out.  This is pretty much a parallel tale - this is happening here, the YouTube stuff is over there, and the Backrooms are endless so there’s plenty of room for both. You don’t need to be up with the mythos to get what’s happening on the occasions when it does intrude, but it’s a nice little Easter egg if you are.

This is the kind of story where less (explanation) is more, and Parsons knows we’re here to be creeped out, not learn a lesson or be handed an extended metaphor for AI generated content. It’s basically a two hander set in a terrifyingly alien yet superficially mundane location where curiosity is just one of the things that’ll get you killed. You'll never look at a service corridor the same way again.

 

- Anthony Morris