If the internet rumor mill is to be believed, there’s no way that 20-year-old Kane Parsons actually directed his captivating debut feature, “Backrooms.” Parsons, whose film is a feature-length adaptation of his liminal horror YouTube series by the same name, is simply too young, commenters have wagered. Despite creating an extensive mythology for the series, taking an interest in the online fascination with liminal spaces — photographs of stores or buildings made eerie by their unnatural emptiness — Parsons must have deferred to a more experienced person on set. No matter that Parsons trained himself on the animation program Blender as a teenager and released the first episode of the “Backrooms” series at 16, with 23 more installments (including a 45-minute-long edition) to follow. Someone that young couldn’t have the skill, much less know enough about life, to direct an intriguing studio film capably. Right?
It’s easy to mistake youth for inexperience. A fair number of teenagers spend their days in school and their evenings doing homework, with their weekends largely consumed by hobbies or trying to get a brief bit of respite from the grueling demands of high school life. The average teenager has never left the country or experienced heartbreak any more acute than the burn of their first breakup, soon to be forgotten by a multitude of other casual flings and serious partners. Most Americans don’t have the opportunity to see or understand much of the world until they step into it for themselves, and even then, the transition is slow. Saving money requires a job, which in turn demands hours invested in school or work, often both at the same time. When you’re young, knowledge comes fast but builds gradually — or, at least that was the case before the internet came around.
(A24) Chiwetel Ejiofor in “Backrooms”
Internet access took a battering ram to information’s door, sending dizzying amounts of data our way overnight. Physical encyclopedias and textbooks were rendered virtually useless. Anyone could learn about anything that sparked their curiosity from the past, present and future. Kids born after 9/11, let’s say, could have a complete understanding of what that day was like, and its thorny global ramifications, as if they were alive and cognizant enough to comprehend the collective fear and confusion. Maybe their perception of it could be even more accurate, unburdened by distorted memories for an inherently objective historical account. Sympathy over empathy. Something like what one might get inside a therapist’s office.
“Backrooms” is a film only a 20-year-old — someone whose existence sits smack in-between decades of uniform past and the blip of a recent few years filled with massive change — could make.
That therapy is a critical narrative element of the “Backrooms” film is no fluke. The movie deals with trauma, somewhat heavy-handedly. But unlike most modern trauma-horror films, a character’s suffering isn’t the crux of the story, but rather its entry point. What follows is a fittingly labyrinthine examination of our obsession with the past, and our envy of those who can see it more clearly than we can. Parsons is one such clear-eyed observer, able to take an internet phenomenon like liminal spaces and pick apart that fascination, studying what prompts the uncanny allure and transforming his findings into a complete, complex thesis.
In Parsons’ view, the appeal of a liminal space isn’t aesthetic emptiness; it’s the implication that these places, once full of life, now sit empty — a clearing hastened by technology and time, that countless people witnessed firsthand. We’ve become so enamored by this void that we inadvertently trapped ourselves inside of it, mourning the past that slipped away before we had a chance to say goodbye. In that regard, “Backrooms” is a film only a 20-year-old — someone whose existence sits smack in-between decades of uniform past and the blip of a recent few years filled with massive change — could make.
How apt, then, that “Backrooms” is set sometime in the ’90s, when the internet first became widely accessible, sending analogue technology into decline and humanity into a nostalgic stasis we wouldn’t fully understand until we were caught inside looking out. The film opens with a gripping found-footage sequence stylistically reminiscent of Parsons’ YouTube series. With nothing but a handheld camcorder, a man traverses endless corridors and rooms adorned with soft-chartreuse wallpaper. The space, which stretches as far as the eye can see, looks like an office, a showroom, a library and a decaying home all at once. Fluorescent light touches almost every corner, but the few shadowy passages seem even more sinister when surrounded by endless lumination. By his pace, we can tell the man is trying to get away from something, looking for a place to hide. There’s a pause before a brief jump scare and a crash cut to static.
Somewhere outside of this netherworld, discount furniture salesman, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), are finishing up their latest session. Clark can’t seem to wriggle free of the loop — drinking to excess, self-pity, professional stagnancy — he’s been in since his wife left him. “I want to try an exercise we’ve done before,” Mary suggests, before the two engage in roleplay. Together, they relive the night Clark’s wife left, with Mary acting as his former spouse. It works, but only to an extent. Clark approaches a breakthrough, but can’t see past his own victim complex before their time is up.
(A24) Renate Reinsve in “Backrooms”
When change happens quickly, like it did when Clark’s wife took off in the night, it can be near-impossible to grapple with. Even the most well-adjusted person isn’t immune to the discomfort of emotional whiplash. Abrupt, unwelcome occurrences scar our autonomy and cripple our illusion of independence; the question of what went wrong falls on our shoulders, another loop to languish inside.
One night, not long after his roleplay session with the good doctor, Clark spots a crack of light coming from a wall in the sub-basement of his store’s showroom. The veil between this world and the next is so thin that Clark can literally walk right through it, from his dingy store into the familiar yellow dimension of the film’s opening sequence. It’s the first real deviation from the dead-eyed cycle of his daily life since his wife grabbed her car keys and never looked back. Naturally, Clark can’t help himself from exploring. Curiosity bleeds into obsession. The loop has presented Clark with a trapdoor disguised as an exit.
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If the “Backrooms” web series wisely brought a creepy static image to life by turning it into a three-dimensional liminal space, the film takes one step — or, more accurately, 30,000 feet of practical sets — further. The marvelous, real-life expanse of the Backrooms set allows Parsons to track his characters through the ceaseless spaces, their architecture subtly growing stranger the further they get. For the viewer, the result is visceral, conjuring the same enchantment and terror Clark has while investigating the space. As he moves deeper and finds scattered, malformed remnants of his past inside the chartreuse oblivion, Clark makes a Faustian pact with whatever entities are inside the Backrooms. To call it purgatory would imply that this is not Clark’s final destination. Hell isn’t fire and brimstone after all; it’s wallpaper, beige carpet and drop ceilings.
Though “Backrooms” and Parsons are adept at creating dread and building worlds, that same principle of complexity is rarely applied to the film’s characters. Both Clark and Mary wrestle with their individual traumas, but the specific points of their histories are explored with less interest than the Backrooms themselves. Implication goes a long way here, and mystery is key to the success of the “Backrooms” series and its lore. But this light touch is frustrating for a film that is otherwise candid about the ways we live and the patterns we stumble into, often brutally so. The lead characters are sketches of real people — mere catalysts for thematic contemplation when they should also be genuinely integral parts of a story. Their fate isn’t nearly as interesting as their predicament. But, then again, maybe the inevitable is tiresome. Death itself is just one part of life. The journey there is typically far more riveting.
(A24/Asterios Moutsokapas) “Backrooms”
Even in the moments it falters, “Backrooms” is like someone coming across the cage we’ve been pacing around in, and pointing out that the bars were always big enough to slip through. We just never noticed because we kept looking down at our feet, trying to ascertain a way out.
Well, unless it isn’t. Is a life spent constantly looking backward instead of hurtling forward even worth grieving? What value is there in an existence spent lamenting what was and what could’ve been? We should all be living for the now — no doubt we’d like to, released from the memory of a recent past where the future looked so much more promising than it does today. The internet boom and the rise of trendy handheld devices and gadgets that came in a rainbow array of colorways feels like eons ago now. That was back when brands appealed to personality types. Now, personality is a brand. Existence is a commodity. The internet is a marketplace. Life is online.
It’s no wonder, then, that someone like Parsons can so deftly perceive and capture this dire reality, where we’ve been dropped into digital solitude after hundreds of years being physical creatures. Born at the exact right time — old enough to witness the dying gasp of a social world, but young enough to witness the birth of a new kind of living — Parsons’ eye offers insight into our preoccupation with time moving faster than it ever has before. He’s old enough to be fascinated by the idea of liminality because it represents the destruction of a facet of life that was once objectively true: community.
(A24) Chiwetel Ejiofor in “Backrooms”
Liminal spaces are stores with everything-must-go signs in their windows; libraries with no one in them; offices with rows of unused desks and underutilized real estate because so many people work from home, or their jobs have been automated. For people who have been living inside this phenomenon, an outsider’s fresh perspective is a godsend. Even in the moments it falters, “Backrooms” is like someone coming across the cage we’ve been pacing around in, and pointing out that the bars were always big enough to slip through. We just never noticed because we kept looking down at our feet, trying to ascertain a way out.
The big, existential question is whether the exit is really an exit, or just a door leading to the next cell. Perhaps we’ve become so comfortable here in this flawed dwelling that any alternative is more frightening than staying put. There’s comfort in sitting and stewing in your discontent. In the Backrooms, where unrest and discontent stretch on for miles, maybe more, we can be as dysfunctional as we want to be. We can sit and rot until we become a version of ourselves resembling the one from the old world, but who is fundamentally different — quieter, angrier, dying. It’s somehow easier to stay in a place that you’re certain will kill you than it is to go back into the real world and actually try to be better, to do the work, to face all of the things that you don’t want to admit; to talk, instead of letting your voice drift through corridors, along walls and into crawl spaces. Turning our heads toward the future aggravates the whiplash induced by rapid change. But the alternative, as “Backrooms” so sagely implies, is remaining stuck in the past, letting ourselves be mutated and misremembered until we look nothing like us at all.
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