Backrooms Review: Brilliant Design, Frustrating Storytelling

Using the internet to launch scary stories and circulate upsetting imagery is nothing new. Backrooms comes to the junction of creepypasta tales and mainstream horror through the lens of Kane Parsons. Much fuss has been made about the young director over the last week, but Parsons’ track record of YouTube horror success is nothing to sneeze at. His feature debut ups the ante in terms of pure visual imagination and spectacle. Unfortunately, the story unravels as it moves into the final act.

What is Backrooms about?

Set in 1990, popular psychologist Mary (Renate Reinsve) meets with a struggling patient. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) recently became single after his wife left him, and his furniture store is facing closure. Nothing goes right in his life, not even filming a commercial with his assistant manager, Kat (Lukita Maxwell), and her boyfriend, Bobby (Finn Bennett).

One night, the lights in his store go crazy. This leads him down into the basement, where he plays with the store’s circuit breaker. Upon flipping a switch, he notices a thin ray of light coming from the wall. He steps over to the wall and falls into a strange, seemingly endless world. However, the endless office space and bizarre rooms hold strange secrets.

The visuals and aesthetics in Backrooms show promise, but the story cannot keep up.

Parsons’ previous shorts had given us a clue into his prowess behind the camera. His YouTube Backrooms series primarily uses the found footage medium, but occasionally gives us omniscient camera footage as well. The majority of Backrooms uses the more traditional perspective but still gives us plenty of subjectivity with the camera. This helps elevate the tension when monsters are just off-screen, while also allowing the audience to breathe in the surrealist aesthetics.

That gives the audience a chance to see some truly virtuosic work. While liminal spaces are often explored on YouTube and in video games, Parsons showcases his creativity. With tables growing out of walls, signage sinking through the ceiling, and disturbing interpretations around every corner, the production team has their work cut out for them. They not only rise to the occasion but also surpass it. Between Parsons and the production design team, they create an experience that puts most multiversal and dream worlds to shame.

Yet even with this in their back pocket, the story is far too reliant on overused horror tropes and the three-hour backlog of Parson’s previous work. While the lore is extensive on Backrooms, expanding beyond Kane’s work, the movie lands with an exposition-laden thud in its final act. Everything that had been subtext and implication becomes explicit. The characters spill their thoughts onto the screen and lose all nuance. It’s ineffective and jarring after the first hour of Backrooms.

While Backrooms still has plenty of world-building and stories to tell in-universe, there is no substantive exploration of these characters in this story. While the themes of control are harped on throughout Backrooms, the opportunities to make larger statements are missed. There’s an anti-AI argument sitting on the surface of the movie that it never fully grapples with. Mental illness and gender roles are ever present. Yet without meaningfully engaging in these ideas in more focused dialogue, the movie becomes about everything and nothing all at once.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of labeling Backrooms as a horror film is that it’s rarely scary. The imagery is certainly surreal, and the monster gives us a couple of jump scares. However, there’s also too much CGI goop. The reveal of a corpse is upsetting, but that’s not scary either. It’s so close to achieving legitimately scary moments, but again, the third act cannot deliver this without overly telegraphing its scares.

Despite this, Backrooms gets an excellent performance from Ejiofor. The actor tackles the listless life of a man who thought he had figured out his future, only to watch it walk away from him. He’s trying his best from start to finish, while also showing an uneasy menace beneath the surface. We know that he’s suffering, and Ejiofor makes Clark into a tragic figure. When a single tear streaks down his face, the emotional catharsis is almost effective enough to save Backrooms.

However, Reinsve gets almost nothing to do in this movie. She’s asked to sit and look concerned, but also cannot give away her true feelings for most of Backrooms. While she finds moments that take us into the movie, the Oscar-nominated actress is somehow underutilized. It’s disappointing, but this is mostly an issue on the page and the edit. They simply do not give us enough to connect with Mary, other than the very obvious “mental illness can destroy a family” storyline.

Is Backrooms worth watching?

Unfortunately, this movie is for hardcore Backrooms fans only. There are moments when Ejiofor almost awakens the film from its slumber. However, there’s not enough Reinsve story for her character to feel relevant to the story, and the conclusion is too obvious for its own good. Parsons clearly has a bright future, but we’d love to see what he can do outside of this universe.

Backrooms is now playing in theaters worldwide. A24 distributes.

Backrooms Review: Brilliant Design, Frustrating Storytelling