Backrooms Review: Empty, Unsettling Horror Experience
A24 rolls the dice on a young, up-and-coming horror director. Kane Parsons was 19 years old when he was given the opportunity to direct a film produced by James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins. Backrooms is based on Parsons’s web series, adapted from the creepypasta. It’s fascinating to see a filmmaker make his feature debut at such a young age, but Parsons is merely part of a wider trend of horror filmmakers coming from YouTube. We’ve had RackaRacka’s Talk to Me, Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks, and, most recently, Curry Barker’s Obsession becoming massive hits. But does Parsons live up to a modern legacy?
In some ways, yes. Backrooms is an unsettling horror film designed to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. It has its issues, and it’s certainly not one of the year’s best horror movies, but there is a lot to appreciate about this first-time director’s approach to the genre. Parsons operates within the “liminal horror” subgenre, defined by eerie, uncanny spaces, such as abandoned shopping malls, empty swimming pools, or, in this case, the endless winding halls of the Backrooms.
The film opens with a long take shot from a person’s POV. It’s designed to look like an old camera, evoking the found-footage aesthetic of The Blair Witch Project. The horror comes not only from the fear that we could run into anything in these hallways, but also from the pure panicked gasps of the person operating the camera. There’s something about the production design that’s very mundane, which is precisely what makes everything so unsettling. The rooms and the halls never seem to end. The decorations are minimal. We’ve never seen anything like this in our day-to-day.
We often throw around the word “nightmare” when describing horror films, but in the case of Backrooms, it very much feels that way. This movie taps into the fear of being completely alone, walking through unfamiliar places where you never know what’s around the corner. What happens if you’re not alone? How will you find your way out? All of these ideas are what made the creepypasta so effective from the start, and Parsons combines found footage and traditional narrative filmmaking to send shivers down your spine.
It feels like a dream you desperately want to wake up from, particularly during those found footage scenes. The film is set in 1990 — remarkably, the filmmaker behind it wasn’t born until the mid-2000s. Yet he perfectly recaptures the era with older television sets and a style of TV commercials you don’t see often anymore. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) owns a furniture store and visits his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). We learn a bit about Clark, his failed marriage, and his unsuccessful attempt to become an architect through a scene they share.
Clark soon discovers that he can phase through a wall in the basement of his store and enter the Backrooms, a long series of rooms and hallways with very light furnishing. Some chairs and other miscellaneous items scatter the area, and we soon discover stranger things, like shoes half-melted through the floor. Mystery and tension begin to build as you wonder what the history of these rooms is. The sound design adds to this, with a low-frequency buzz that feels familiar and mostly diegetic sounds. Backrooms leans into the unknown, with these infinite hallways and the fear that something may be lurking just out of sight.
Where the film suffers the most is in the story and character department. We really don’t care much about either of our leads, despite the efforts to give them backstories. We quickly learn that Clark has a tragic past, but we don’t feel much sympathy for him. There’s an element to his character that feels deeply disturbed, but we don’t get far enough into his psyche. Perhaps it’s because we hear his backstory much more than we see it, but overall, he still feels like a stranger.
Backrooms does something unique with its perspective: it starts out mainly following Clark, but after something happens, we shift to Mary’s perspective as she discovers and enters the Backrooms, searching for him. Unfortunately, Mary isn’t a very interesting character either. We do see some of her backstory, but it’s not enough to make us feel for her as a human. Her setup feels vague, and it doesn’t amount to anything meaningful by the end. Like Clark, there’s a lot missing to get us to care about and understand her. It’s surprising how the weaker elements of the film come from industry writer Will Soodik; one wonders what Parsons could do with a screenplay he wrote himself, for better or worse.
Although we do find ourselves indifferent to these characters, Parsons does a superb job helming another found-footage sequence halfway through the movie, along with a chase that is quite thrilling. By the end, Backrooms does feel like it asks a lot more questions than it answers. Of course, ambiguity is part of the horror. Not knowing is what makes these rooms so unsettling. But when you go into a movie where you’re asking a lot of questions at the beginning, it can be disappointing to have the credits roll with many of these questions still unanswered.
The biggest sell with Backrooms is the experience of going through these rooms and not knowing what you may see. It’s quite effective for a while, and Parsons cements himself as a director with considerable skill and potential.
SCORE: 6/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 6 equates to “Decent.” It fails to reach its full potential and is a run-of-the-mill experience.
Disclosure: ComingSoon attended a press screening for our Backrooms review.
Source: Comingsoon.net