Backrooms

If you found a mysterious portal to a weird set of rooms, wouldn't you turn and run? If your answer was yes, then congratulations, you have a functioning brain. However, in Backrooms, Clark becomes infatuated with these rooms and wants to keep exploring even after realizing the area is not 100 percent safe.

Backrooms is set in the 90's and tells the story of a large liminal space that is stumbled upon by furniture store owner Clark. The space keeps growing and changing, which not only makes it hard to map out but also makes it hard to understand what is living deep in the bowels of these backrooms.  The more we learn about the backrooms, the more unsettling this all becomes.

There will be spoilers ahead, so this is your first and only warning. Enter at your own risk. Backrooms is a very stressful horror film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Lukita Maxwell, and was directed by Kane Parsons. Fun Fact: At 19, Parsons became the youngest director to helm an A24 film.  It has similar vibes to Barbarian, Cabin in the Woods, Coraline, or Us. I promise there’s no creepy monsters waiting.

Backrooms trailer didn’t show much, which had me wondering what’s going on in the head of the person who thought this up. Something about the room color and lack of life made it seem very eerie.  The beginning was a surprise because it was actually really scary and set up the tone of how, when you are in the backrooms, the space is endless, and you are not alone.  There is a big buildup to showing the monster, which was great for building that tension.

The world in the movie is a mirror of our world that’s living and remembers, but as it remembers more, it forgets more, so it’s similar but also very different. I like the comparison in the film to trying to draw a dog from memory; from afar, it looks right, but up close, you see the inconsistencies. It was very weird to see the people down there who looked like experimented people, but they weren’t real at all.

We start and finish with scientists who know how dangerous things are, but the goal seems less about using these people as test subjects and more about exploring unknown territory. The issue is that everything seems endless, and doors keep popping up, so it’s getting out of their control. Interestingly, they aren’t more proactive in keeping people safe. They know about the backrooms and how they are endless and possibly dangerous for the common folk, so you would think they would either put up warnings or keep an eye out. I am curious to learn more about this organization that made MRI machines stumble upon this.

The cast is great. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, who is just down on his luck and loves architecture, but his dreams didn’t pan out. Mary is his therapist who is trying to help people, but has trauma from her childhood with her schizophrenic mom. Kat is the assistant manager played by Lukita Maxwell,  who honestly is just looking for an easy paycheck, but can you blame her? She lives with her boyfriend Bobby, played by Finn Bennett, who is there for vibes and his camera. One performance that will get overlooked is Robert Bobroczkyi, who plays the Pirate Clark, an entity that resembles Clark, which was deeply unsettling when we finally see him.

Mary is the only one who makes it out alive, but we don’t know if she is free to go or in prison. However, by the end, the Backrooms have started to remember her as she was sitting in the interrogation room. Kat and Bobby’s deaths were sad because they were dragged into this, and Kat was uneasy about it to begin with, but Clark really wanted to explore more. As you watch, you realize Kat had a great point, but hey, why listen to the person with logic?

Some nightmare sequences of Mary truly scared me. They were a mix of her past with her mom and the demolition of her childhood home. Some of them weren’t real, but the way they seemed so innocent only to end horribly always shook me. The one with her mom coming to the window was a jump scare I knew was coming, but still made me jump, and then right after, there was a demolition that also shook me to my core. I love how with these two major events shown, you could understand Mary more and how she deals with her relationships.

At the end of the film, we see Mary's replica that was melted into the chair. I was wondering if that meant she never left or just that the rooms remembered her.

The backroom was a literal maze from hell. The movie was shot so well that you can take in how unsettling and stressful everything was. I think something like that could be bland-looking, but they found a way to make it look interesting and nightmarish. All the yellow rooms were unsettling, and then we got to a Christmas room that’s dark, except for the lights glowing from the tree, which was a change of scenery, but still didn’t make me feel any less stressed. If you haven’t noticed, I would be like Kat in that scenario because the whole thing is scary vibes, and I just don’t understand how people felt comfortable after walking through a wall.

The music really added to the dread of the film. It made me feel even more stressed for the characters, and I love it when music gets the emotions running high.

My favorite part of the film was the whole Backrooms idea. It's such an unsettling thing, but also something that had me on the edge of my seat, trying to understand as much as I can about these rooms like I’m a scientist. It’s a cool idea that I would have never even thought of, but they took it and did a good job making this feature-length film about these sinister backrooms that no human should be exploring without proper tools for safety, since you’ll be battling pirate men and climbing, jumping, and running for your life.

Backrooms is a creepy new addition to A24’s massive roster. Watching in a theatre upped the spookiness and made me feel like I was in those Backrooms. The premise is strange, but in a way that works and delivers what the film intends to deliver: skin-crawling horror. Backrooms is a movie that will make you second-guess exploring random areas without proper safety precautions.