What evil lurks in the drabbest of interiors?<\/p>\n
The meme-rooted \u201cBackrooms\u201d<\/a> is the latest movie to pull its mounting horrors out of liminal spaces. \u201cExit 8,\u201d<\/a> released earlier this year, was set entirely in a subway corridor. In \u201cBackrooms,\u201d a struggling furniture salesperson discovers beneath his store an underground labyrinth, all lined with yellow wallpapered walls and fluorescent lighting.<\/p>\n Where \u201cBackrooms\u201d came from is more interesting \u2014 and potentially meaningful \u2014 than the result. The movie, directed by 20-year-old YouTuber-turned-filmmaker Kane Parsons, is a fitfully unsettling nightmare that never convincingly builds beyond its creepy, dated-decor premise.<\/p>\n But the \u201cBackrooms\u201d backstory is more intriguing. In 2019, an anonymous post on 4chan creepypasta \u2014 an online repository for internet-created urban legends \u2014 provided the initial image of the seemingly infinite Backrooms with a caption describing \u201cnothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz.\u201d<\/p>\n Like many others, Parsons \u2014 who has posted under \u201cKane Pixels\u201d \u2014 picked up the idea and ran with it. His YouTube series expanded on the 4chan post, adding a found footage approach. Eventually, A24 greenlit his movie, the big-screen product of an internet-born concept.<\/p>\n But while the hive mind of the internet can produce some glorious things, movies require closer to a single author. And \u201cBackrooms,\u201d written by Will Soodik and produced by Osgood Perkins, struggles to retrofit a compelling story to match its disquietingly banal imagery.<\/p>\n Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is the not-exactly-proud owner of Cap\u2019n Clark\u2019s Ottoman Empire, a sad and empty furniture store located in a 1990s strip mall. He has plenty of concerns \u2014 his failed architect aspirations, the end of his marriage, any customers at all \u2014 but unexplained electric troubles at the store also nag him. The lights keep flickering.<\/p>\n When Clark inspects the circuit breaker, there are odd, irregular breakers at the bottom of the panel. Who put them there? What are they for? If there’s one thing \u201cBackrooms\u201d gets spot on, it’s the mysteries of the circuit breaker. One night, Clark goes looking in the store\u2019s lower floor when he unwittingly passes right through the wall, and into the Backrooms.<\/p>\n Wonderland it is not. The seemingly never-ending chambers almost resemble vacant, nondescript office spaces. But they\u2019re stranger, like art installation versions of office space. There are piles of furniture, shrunken doors and disturbingly random things like a stop sign or a cardboard cutout with a cassette player saying hello in different languages. Clark later describes the rooms as though they were made \u201cby a bunch of construction workers on acid.\u201d<\/p>\n The uncanny dimensions and strange recesses of modern workplaces have been a common motif lately, from \u201cSeverance\u201d to \u201cThe Chair Company.\u201d And it\u2019s hard not to see the endless iterations of the Backrooms as a metaphor for the internet itself.<\/p>\n But Parsons pushes the setting into a psychological realm. One of the only other characters we see Clark interact with before he grows obsessed with exploring the rooms is his therapist, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). \u201cWe all have our loops, our habits,\u201d she tells him in a session.<\/p>\n The subterranean labyrinth increasingly begins to resemble a warped version of Clark\u2019s own looped psychology. Its many doors go deeper into his psyche, and Mary (whose new book is titled \u201cThe Window Within\u201d) becomes trapped too.<\/p>\n As a horror, fluorescent-lit riff on Michel Gondry\u2019s \u201cEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,\u201d \u201cBackrooms\u201d doesn\u2019t quite work. While the movie finds a potentially insightful pathway to a story, it can\u2019t bridge its very physical, wall-to-wall-carpeted labyrinth with Clark\u2019s mental state. A movie with so many doors ultimately can’t find the right one.<\/p>\n Despite a paper-wall-thin concept, both Ejiofor and Reinsve give \u201cBackrooms\u201d some depth. Ejiofor<\/a> has almost always been a supremely level-headed screen presence, but here embraces a latent capacity for fevered mania. Reinsve, the star of \u201cThe Worst Person in the World\u201d<\/a> and \u201cSentimental Value,\u201d<\/a> proves especially absorbing in her first horror film. She gives the movie a slinky intelligence.<\/p>\n