Creepypasta phenomenon Backrooms makes the leap to the big screen with most of its uncanny creepiness intact.
It’s 1990, and Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the owner and proprietor of dirt cheap discount furniture outlet Captain Clark’s Ottoman Empire, is divorced, drinking too much, and resentful of both his ex-wife and the failing store he opened to support her through law school. We learn this mainly through his prickly sessions with his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), who’s hauling around her own considerable load of trauma even as she peddles self-help books.
Things kick into gear when Clark, who has taken to sleeping on one of his store’s display beds while numbing himself with bourbon and sneering at the homemade ads of his competitors, discovers a portal to another world in the basement. Not to Narnia or anything as fantastical as that, but to a seemingly endless complex of hallways and office spaces, littered with piles of furniture and other ephemera and lit by oppressively humming fluorescents. The deeper he goes, the weirder things get – and unfortunately for him, he’s not alone in there.
Backrooms is the film of the YouTube shorts of the creepypasta phenomenon, brought to us by YouTuber turned feature director Kane Parsons, who started making the shorts when he was a teenager and manages to translate the unsettling creepiness of those DIY clips to the larger canvas of cinema. Creepypastas and other artefacts of contemporary internet horror run on vibes, and the vibes here are exquisite: the alienating mood of commercial spaces, the loneliness of modern life, the dissociation of moving through time and space without purpose. And of course, the sense that reality itself is out of whack, here represented by the uncanny nature of the Backrooms themselves, which look, as the film itself repeatedly notes says, like they were built by something that only had such places described to them. Hence, we have doors to nowhere, partitions and walls in nonsensical arrangements, furniture piled in heaps or inexplicably jutting out of the walls, and, of course, monsters.
Backrooms is at its best when its keeping our attention locked on first Clark and then Mary when she eventually goes looking for him after he disappears. A few other characters flit in and out, including Finn Bennett and Shrinking‘s Lukita Maxwell as Clark’s store employees and Mark Duplass as an interloper who knows more about the Backrooms than our hapless protagonists. Thanks to committed performances from Ejiofor and Reinsve, coupled with the film’s exceptional production design, a mood of sustained uneasiness is maintained, punctuated by a few effective jump scares. Well, I jumped at any rate; your mileage may vary, as ever.
Things wobble a little when the film finally shows its hand in showing exactly what is roaming that endless beige purgatory, but how could they not? What our imaginations fill in is always scarier than what we eventually get on screen, no matter how impressive the creature designs. Likewise, a few nods in the direction of the wider backstory Parsons has established in his earlier shorts are a touch wearying, if only because they hint at the possibility of a follow up that will lay more of the Backrooms’ secrets open, which would be a mistake. It’s the unknown that haunts us after all, along with our our past mistakes. Still, as a one and done, Backrooms is a superb little chiller.
Backrooms is in cinemas now.
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