Rooms Got Back

Backrooms was never likely to struggle financially. The last couple of years have taught us that if you can turn Gen Z out, box office success tends to follow. Given the viral subject matter (more on that later) a younger audience were always likely to show up in more than enough numbers to turn a profit on a moderately budgeted horror film. The question facing studio A24 and 20 year old (yes that's right, 20 year old) director Kane Parsons was what to do with the free hit. Do you double down on the premise in order to satiate the TikTok crowd? Or do you layer on the themes and character in order to create an "elevated" horror more in keeping with the A24 brand? It seems they were never quite able to commit to one approach or the other and the final product falls unsatisfyingly in between.

For those unaware of the Backrooms phenomenon, it began life as a creepypasta, modern folklore where people share an unsettling picture online and create stories around it. The idea with the Backrooms is that you can slip out of reality and end up in the space behind. This space consists of endless rooms, usually offices space, that could almost pass as normal looking on first glance but has something is out of place. Maybe a chair is half stuck in the floor, or furniture is stacked at an impossible angle. Parsons made a series of short films about researchers exploring these uncanny corridors, the success of which led to this film.

The investigators are still around but the story here focuses on alcoholic furniture store owner Clarke (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve). After odd things start happening with his store's electrics, Clarke discovers a way into the Backrooms in the shop basement and becomes obsessed with the space, telling Mary he will prove it is real.

The star of the show is very much the Backrooms themselves. More than 30,000 square feet of labyrinthine set was constructed across four soundstages and the commitment to creating a real physical space pays off. The banal absurdity of the rooms, sickly lighting and constant low buzz of electricity create an unnerving atmosphere and are as complete a realisation of the original idea as it is possible to get. The visual instincts of the young director are undeniable. The impact is slightly lessened by the fact the movie's "real" world is already quite strange, taking place as it does in a pastel coloured 1990's that looks like a Wes Anderson cosplay.

The blurring of the line between real and imaginary plays into the notion that the rooms, and the thing that stalks them, are related to Clarke's personal demons. However, despite running nearly two hours the film doesn't give enough time to develop this angle, and flat out undercuts it with a franchise baiting ending. Ejiofor is, unsurprisingly, great in the role and had he been given more space to cut loose we may well have been in "snubbed by awards because it's a horror film performance" territory. Fresh off the back of an acclaimed performance in last year's Sentimental Value, Reinsve is given far too little to do. Most of her character development is done via childhood flashbacks, leaving her with a pretty frivolous woman in peril role come the finale. When you have snared actors this good you should lean on them more than this script does.

That's the issue with Backrooms in general, it all feels a bit too restrained. Tonally, it nails the creepy atmosphere of the titular space but the real horror of such quasi-normality is the idea you could be lost there forever, something the movie doesn't really explore. Likewise, there are the bones of a layered character story here, but we aren't allowed to stray too far from the central conceit's internet based roots. Hopefully the inevitable sequel lets loose. 

6 furniture pirates out of 10.