Backrooms - Review

Backrooms is my biggest disappointment of the year so far, and it’s my fault. I’ve said multiple times in reviews that horror shorts turned into feature length projects is a trend I dislike a lot, but the legitimacy and hype around Backrooms had me fooled. I was wooed by the ever impressive A24 marketing, and the stellar cast. This one felt different to previous short turned feature, like Baghead and Night Swim. Like both of these films, there are brief scary moments but not enough story to drag it out to a full hour and a half.

Backrooms is slightly different because the short film has continued and there is more lore in the webseries, however, the film itself has to establish this for new viewers, which ends up stunting the intrigue of the film and getting muddied up with trying to have well rounded characters, a satisfying explanation and enough scares to satisfy a hungry audience.

Backrooms follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who is in a bit of a rut in his life. His furniture store, which is a pirate themed warehouse of mediocre pieces, is struggling to keep up with competition. He’s also lonely, living in the store at night and drinking his problems away. His attempt to get back on the right path after his separation from his wife is to see a therapist. Mary (Renate Reinsve) tries to work through Clark’s problems whilst dealing with her own struggles, letting go of her past, childhood trauma with an overbearing and paranoid mother.

Clark begins to experience some electrical issues in the store, with lights flickering at night when he’s trying to watch TV in a display bed. The lights flicker again, and in his frustration, Clark heads to the breaker box, turning off all the lights. Avoiding the weird, unexplained switches that are placed askew at the bottom of the breaker box. On his walk back upstairs, a crack of light seemingly comes out from the solid wall. Clark curiously investigates, realising he can walk through that section of the wall.

Inside, is a mustard yellow office building with an endless array of hallways and configurations of rooms. The layout is slightly off, with strange phenomena in the design cropping up at every new turn.

When Clark is consumed by the desire to discover this location's secrets, Mary begins to worry and follows him in, discovering the horrors for herself, that it might not only be Clark and her stuck in this maze.

What didn’t work for me in terms of story is the cramming in of half baked character back stories that felt like they were jammed into the metaphor of the Backrooms. My reading of the Backrooms is a stubbornness to let go of the past, and the further distortion of memories as time passes, until they become something else, and sometimes, a lot worse.

For both Clark and Mary, I felt they lacked a strong enough connection to this. Even with the detail of Mary’s backstory, it is dripped in with a flashback or two without really giving you enough to cling on to.

I don’t need every story to be spelled out to me but I think even with the great acting in this film, there isn’t enough in the script to give you something to emotionally anchor on to. For me, the emotional connection is what makes a good horror. Having that connection to the characters in their perilous situations are the only way I feel the sadness and true scariness of horror is felt.

I also disliked the pace of the film at times, where I think it relied on the bizarre nature of the Backrooms to guide the runtime. It was at times like a sight seeing tour of the “oh isn’t that strange?” and “That’s not supposed to be there”. I think a lot more of the film could have hit harder with a duo exploring the backrooms, being able to comment on some of the situations or having a different opinion on continuing further.

What I did like was a lot of the technical elements of the film, with a supposed 30,000 square foot set, the Backrooms do genuinely feel endless, and weird. The liminal space horror works so well in the found footage sections, where I think the only real tension of the film is felt.

The found footage sections capture what I think is scary and intriguing about the horror of Backrooms. You are grounded with the person holding the camera, with no safety of a smooth camera movement and an ability to distance yourself from a character. Backrooms also embodies a sort of “internet horror”, that for me is about exploring a space, finding something odd, ramping up the tension and then running for your life, looking back and seeing something unexplained chasing, and gaining on you. There are scenes in Backrooms that feel like this, just an unrelenting chase that doesn’t let up until a crash to another oddity that feels like false hope the second you enter it.

The score also works great in these moments, with a collaborative effort from director Kane Parsons and Edo Van Breemen. It has a very off putting quality to it that I think fits those found footage sections perfectly.

Regardless of my opinions on the story, I do think the fact this film exists because of a 20 year old Kane Parsons’ passion is so impressive. He created something so intriguing that it piqued the interest of some of the biggest names in horror, with A24, James Wan and Osgood Perkins putting their names behind it.

Osgood Perkins' involvement seems very evident in the film, with a lot of the crew migrating from his previous features.

The names surrounding this film gave it a level of legitimacy that I think it deserves. However, I also think it deserves a better story and a commitment to the explanation of the lore. There are hints to it in the film that I feel are more unsatisfying than anything. They almost feel like a noncommittal approach from the team behind this to explain anything because they’re not sure if that’s what they want to do.

Parsons talked in an interview that he would like to continue telling this story in an eight part TV series, which I hope is able to tell a more compelling story than this one. I think such a cultural phenomenon like this one deserves a better showing to the wider world.