Chiwetel Ejiofor gets a look behind the curtain of reality in A24’s Backrooms.
The idea that something uncanny is hiding just beneath the surface of the real world is an intoxicating one, and it’s one that only gets more enticing as our own reality becomes more and more surreal. It’s the sort of mindbending conceit that’s fueled a thousand creepypastas, and now one of them is coming to the big screen courtesy of A24.
Backrooms Trailer
What’s the plot?
As the official synopsis tells us:
A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom.
But there’s a lot of lore to dig into, if you feel like going down the rabbit hole. The Backrooms entered our reality via the medium of 4chan inspired by an old photo of a hobby store mid-renovation, and soon developed into a shared anthology about mysterious locations that abut a sort of hidden other dimension. Or, as one poster posted:
If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you
Then, Youtuber and filmmaker Kane Parsons, who is also directing the feature, was inspired to create a 23 episode found footage series with the title truncated to simply Backrooms, which Wikipedia describes thusly:
Set primarily in the 1990s, the series revolves around Async, a fictional research institute that discovers The Backrooms (in-universe referred to as “The Complex”) and attempts to study and document it. Following this discovery, missing person cases begin to skyrocket as people are pulled into The Complex. Most installments are centered around various anomalies Async comes across in The Complex.
Now, A24‘s Backrooms the movie is bringing us is the story of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Clark, who’s desperate to prove to his therapist that the Backrooms exist. I’m sure that works out just great for all involved.
Who’s in it?
Chiwetel Ejiofor is Clark, Renate Reinsve is Dr. Mary Kilne, while Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia round out the cast.
When’s it out?
Backrooms warps into Australian cinemas on May 28.
What’s the vibe?
I love this kind of emergent, internet culture horror as a concept, and it looks like Parsons has gone to great lengths to retain the skin-crawling sense of the uncanny that makes the best ones work. Whether there’s enough story for a feature is anyone’s guess. but it’s looking good so far.
