In a year that has been packed with cinematic versions both good and downright fucking awful, Backrooms was never going to make for an easy adaptation.
I mean, the liminal space horror that has long-since turned into something of a meme online, brought to life by a director barely out of high school in his very first full-length feature? It had the hallmarks of an audacious flop. But, with the movie finally out last week, the series, which started life as a post in a 4Chan thread, has made it to the big screen at last – and it’s something of a hit. Earning success both critical and commercial, Backrooms has already cemented itself as one of the most buzz-worthy horrors of the year. But the question is – well, is it any good? And the answer to that is yes, with a serious but.
Directed by Kane Parsons, who created the iconic Backrooms Found Footage series, the story follows furniture store manager Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) after he discovers what appears to be a portal to a mysterious dimension in the bottom of his store, only for his troubled therapist Mary (Renate Renisve) to become involved with his mission to find out more.
As I mentioned when the trailer for this movie first dropped, I was especially curious to see how Parsons would handle making a horror story out of a place that is known for its complete lack of…well, almost anything, actually. And how he does that is actually pretty inspired, turning Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Clark into the picture of discomforting indolence. We meet Clark in a therapy session, self-help chatter filling out the backdrop for a not-insignificant part of the film’s runtime, and there’s this deliberate wrong-footing as Parsons lets you believe that this is about change, growth, improvement. When it’s nothing of the sort, and that’s where the horror comes from; Clark actually wants nothing more but to sink into the comfort of the person he has become instead of trying to change it. In the same way the Backrooms themselves are defined by their mundanity and how their twisted version of it poisons everyone who comes into contact with it, Clark’s unwillingness to change and comfort in his own indolence ultimately leads to his downfall.
And, in those terms, I think the film is a pretty unmitigated success. Ejiofor is brilliant as Clark, abrasive and frustrating but fully-formed as a character, and the Backrooms themselves serve as the setting for some of the coolest and most uncanny visual moments I’ve seen recently in horror. Parsons had a great eye for the slightly-off, even when he’s not in the Backrooms, in little moments like Clark having set up a proto-bedroom as he lives out of his furniture store, the domestic and the commercial oddly and uncomfortably combined. The choice to hold back on the main monster in the Backrooms until release was the right one, as the design and execution (pun fully intended) is shocking in the best way possible. The nods to Parsons’ found footage take on the series make sense and are handled with the skill you’d expect of someone who made their name in the subgenre, and there’s just enough in the way of levity to keep things from becoming too dirge-like.
But the film does not end with Clark’s story, which is where it really loses me. After we deal with his arc, we spend another chunk of the movie with Renate Renisve’s Mary (who, I have to admit, I wasn’t as taken with – she’s a great actor, but the breathing-hard-with-lips-slightly-parted-in-shock thing got tired fast for me in this film) as she escapes the Backrooms and is discovered by a mysterious group who are investigating them. We get a few minutes with Mark Duplass as Phil, one of the people delving into the truth of the Backrooms, and, with no concrete answers, we pretty much cut to credits. It’s a very abrupt end to the movie, and one that feels as though it comes in entirely the wrong place; for the runtime so far, we’ve been with people who know as much about the Backrooms as we do, only to be introduced to characters who know a significant amount more and who declare this one of the most important things in human history, and then…it’s over? Parsons has already announced his intentions to continue with more movies in this series, but this ending really feels more like sequel baiting than it does like a satisfying end to the story we spent the majority of the movie with.
Backrooms’ oddly-bifurcated story leaves things on a rather frustrating note, which is a shame, because the movie that comes before is a pretty strong take on a tough concept by a young filmmaker who clearly has a great deal of promise in the genre. With all that said, I’d be really interested to hear your takes on this movie, whether as a fan of the Backrooms stories to begin with, or as a newcomer to the series – let me know in the comments below!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via BBC)
No But Listen 