Chiwetel Ejiofor delivers a barnstormingly good performance in Kane Parsons' feature directorial debut, Backrooms, an icily brilliant and genuinely disturbing conceptual horror film that rewrites the genre rulebook. Based on Parsons' web series and scripted by Will Soodik, the film explores memory, reality, and fear as Ejiofor's character accesses an infinite series of hidden rooms that all feel creepily askew.
A Haunting Debut from a Young Director
Twenty-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons makes his feature directing debut with this chilling film, which draws from J-horror, the V/H/S found footage franchise, Dan Erickson's Severance, and Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal. The story centers on people walled up in their own memories, imprisoned in endlessly replayed scenes from their past or miserably perceived versions of their present existences, where they become caricatures of themselves—gargoyle stars of a paralysed inner world of failure. Or perhaps the backrooms simply exist, without metaphor.
Performances and Plot
Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve give barnstormingly good performances as Clark and Mary. Set in the early 1990s, Clark is a failed architect, separated from his wife, and an alcoholic. To make ends meet, he self-hatingly manages a dreary and eerily vast discount furniture store called Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire. He does dumb TV ads dressed as a pirate, uneasily aware he should be a sultan to make the pun work. He visits a therapist, Mary, a sad, gentle person who markets her own self-help audio tapes and is haunted by childhood memories of her abusive mother.
Clark has to sleep in his store, in one of the beds in the little bedroom tableaux—strange approximations of people's actual living spaces. One day, in the huge basement section, he discovers a supernaturally porous section of wall through which he can walk to discover an infinitely vast secret network of backrooms: strange installation-style areas showing snapshots of what appear to be different versions of reality. It goes on forever. Clark finds that getting out of this non-Narnia of non-places isn't easy, and neither does Mary when she goes in to look for him.
Production Design and Cinematography
The production design by Danny Vermette is amazing, combining genuine constructions and digital fabrication. With cinematographer Jeremy Cox, they create an ineffably oppressive, crepuscular dead yellowish light—a light that leaks like radon gas from the strip lighting of a million malls, stores, and office buildings. Backrooms progressively raises its game towards the big finish with jump scares, squirm scares, and tiny shiver scares. There is real fascination in exploring this vast, invisible city state of fear.
Backrooms is out on 28 May in Australia and on 29 May in the UK and US.
