Backrooms (5/5 Stars)

Conversations about Backrooms tend to always include tales of its inspiration. People want to know where this came from. The curiosity can be explained by a brief summary of its unlikely creator and subject. It is an excellent debut feature of Director Kane Parsons, who just turned 21 in June. So he was all of 20 years old when he made this movie. The movie itself is a film expansion of a YouTube series that Mr. Parsons started when he was all of 16 years old. That series was inspired by what is now a famous image of an abandoned backroom of an OshKosh furniture store. I've included it at the bottom of this review.

Mr. Parson’s YouTube series costs next to nothing to make, which having seen it, I can attest is incredible in and of itself. The Backrooms movie cost $10mm. It has so far grossed near $400mm in the box office as of my writing this. Mr. Parson’s has set numerous records for the youngest director to make a certain amount of money at the box office. An Oscar nomination for Best Director may be a bit of a reach, but my God, the Academy would have a hole in its head if it didn’t nominate this movie for Best Production Design, because you have not seen anything like it.

I came in cold not knowing anything about 4Chan’s creepypasta subforum or the apparently very popular webseries. I have had some familiarity with inherently creepy spaces though due to my origination in the Southwest of the USA. Suburban development in the deserts of the Southwest have a tendency to create man-made spaces that are just a little bit too large. Since there is nothing living in the natural landscape, there is nothing to displace, and thus no constraint on bigness. But since it is a desert, it feels weird that there should be anything at all. So you get these giant buildings, think McMansions and Costco Warehouses, that seem to be plopped down by aliens, especially when the development comes all of a sudden, which in the case of exurbs, it usually does. The movie Backrooms takes place in a big-box furniture store in inland California or the outskirts of Las Vegas or somewhere outside of Phoenix. It actually isn’t specified but it could easily be any of these places. They all look and feel the same. Down in the basement of this furniture store, where there is even more furniture, the store’s owner finds a door that leads into another dimension: the Backrooms, like to his store or something else, that just go on forever, like you were playing a game of Minecraft that was comprised of nothing but yellow carpets, yellow wallpaper, and florescent lighting.

This store owner, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a former architect and recent divorcee selling cheap furniture. He explains what he has found to his therapist, played by Renate Reinsve, as if someone had described a dog to somebody else who had never seen a dog, and then that somebody constructed a dog. It has all the correct details, but something is off. It looks like a dog, but is also not a dog. This is also a pretty good way of describing the “uncanny valley”, a phenomenon in animation where the closer an object or image appears to being human, while also not being non-human, the more it elicits uncanny or eerie feelings in the viewer. Zombies, dead humans that act alive, are a very good example. And the numerous liminal spaces in Backrooms are very much like Zombie Rooms, they look man-made but also are clearly not man-made.

Most of this movie is direction and Kane Parsons demonstrates a preternatural ability to draw out suspense from his built environment. Take the first five minutes, which comprises “found footage” of someone exploring the Backrooms. There is no actor on screen. The character is holding a video camera and we only hear him speaking. “Found footage” can be naturally suspenseful because the video camera’s aspect ratio is less than that of the human eye and we can only see what we are being directed to see. So when something scary starts chasing our characters through the Backrooms it's like being chased in real life with a bag over your head or something. What makes much of Backrooms scary is what made those other low-budget horror films like Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity scary, but Backrooms is undoubtedly a better product. I didn’t watch those other movies and look up the director’s name nor was I surprised when all they did with their careers were sequels. I expect Backrooms to have many sequels, but I also expect Kane Parsons to move onto bigger and better things maybe after only one or two of them.

Let’s say something about Chiwetel Ejiofor who is an interesting choice to lead this movie. It also says something that Mr. Ejiofor accepted the role. You usually don’t see an established 49-year-old actor taking direction from 20-year-old directors in feature film debuts. It’s not like Mr. Ejiofor needs a comeback or anything. There is a certain nobility to Ejiofor, and it seems natural for him to portray a NASA scientist in The Martian or the titular character in Shakespeare’s Othello. For the same reasons, he is also very good at playing characters that are not quite where they should be, whether it is an African surgeon turned illegal immigrant in London moonlighting as a hotel worker in Dirty Pretty Things (2002) or a professional violinist kidnapped and sold into slavery in 12 Years a Slave (2012). Just two years ago, he was walking around another liminal space, an abandoned suburb during an apocalpytic event in The Life of Chuck (2024). Here he is a professional architect, now divorced and nursing alcoholism, who is forced to sleep in one of the beds of his under-performing furniture shop in the middle-of-nowhere. An actor brings their baggage (previous roles) with them as they move forward in their career. For Ejiofor, seeing him in this movie with this character, it's like he never got out of those awful situations he was in fifteen-twentyfive years ago. And he’s bitter about it. He should not be here at this point in his life. There is this simmering resentment that he takes with him into the Backrooms, and you should see what the Backrooms does with it in return. This is one of his best performances.

This is the first role I’ve seen Renata Reinsve in. She is very good, but I have limited things to say about her. Mark Duplass shows up in a limited side-role. He is a good presence to have in any low budget movie as he made his name making good movies with no budgets. His involvement as a veteran of the genre feels like a stamp of approval.