Backrooms | A Generation-Defining Nightmare Labyrinth

And so proceeds my distorted remembrance of it…

Backrooms has been a long time coming. It remains shocking to me how long it took big-budget Hollywood to wake up to the phenomenon of analog horror. The cultural interest in dead malls peaked years ago alongside vaporwave music and Sonic.exe. And if that made no sense to you, you had to be there. None of those made their way into cinema, unless you count Severance. But luckily, Backrooms also arrives at the absolute perfect time, serving as a terrifying encapsulation of a generation and an art medium stuck in a limbo of a potential impending technological catastrophe, government conspiracies, therapyspeak, and a longing for the world before the Internet changed everything.

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Viewers unaware of the concept of the backrooms can enjoy the film, but a little historical context might be helpful. The idea originated from a post on 4chan, a social media platform like Reddit but with users that are somehow worse. It is a similar image to the one on the review cover. As would be discovered later, the photo was of an empty furniture store. Via its quiet, outdated emptiness, a whole Internet subculture was spawned. It quickly became more complex through fan-fiction and theorizing, turning into a realm of infinitely repeated “backrooms” of a store. Quickly, new types of liminal spaces joined in: fast-food playgrounds, indoor swimming pools, and more.

YouTuber Kane Pixels, or Kane Parsons, created a YouTube series based on the original Backrooms image using the computer graphics software Blender. The first video, released in January of 2022, has now garnered over 75 million views. A feature film adaptation was confirmed in 2023 and Parsons became the youngest A24 director. Alongside Iron Lung and Obsession, this new wave of YouTuber-made horror has taken over the box office and even surpassed the latest Star Wars entry.

Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, the owner of a failing furniture store and a recently divorced alcoholic. Lukita Maxwell and Finn Bennett also appear as employees of the store, who are mostly there to be the type of dumb young adults that populate slasher movies. Clark is undergoing therapy with Mary (Renate Reinsve) when he discovers a mysterious portal in the basement of his store. Backrooms ensue. The relationship at the heart of the film is between therapist and client, a dynamic not usually depicted.

As a clinical psychology doctoral student, the foregrounding of therapy and psychology as critical elements here could have gone terribly for me as I have more of an eye for errors. Therapy is rarely represented accurately and the themes around mental illness and trauma could have gone “I’m twelve and this is deep”. The screenplay by Will Soodik and director Kane Parsons thankfully avoids that to create something that will probably be a perennial watch in my corner of the field. In fact, there is a non-zero chance that I (and many others) will integrate the film into future research projects.

The general metaphor that the backrooms represent is rather obvious, although it touches on many subthemes subtly in a way few seem to have noticed. What is smartly done, however, is that just enough ambiguity is kept to allow for a variety of interpretations. Some critics have accused the third act of overexplaining, which is their prerogative, but I ultimately disagree that it either a) actually overexplains the mystery and not just explains it more or b) disrupts the overall film. There are definitely odd, unexplained disjunctions in the narrative that may be frustrating to viewers craving realism and logistics. My advice would be to expect a surreal dream-logic along the lines of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m thinking of ending things, or David Lynch. There are complicated lore explanations out there if you want to understand it on that level, most of which appear to be in the YouTube series. In my view, trying to fully rationalize the backrooms ruins the mystique and the emotional and thematic threads do hold up in the end.

Trying to sum up what is so culturally and philosophically resonant about Backrooms is, to quote one character, like trying to describe a dog to someone who has never seen one before. What I will say is that it is tapping into the many of the same concerns that Magnifica Humanitas addressed. There is one passage worth quoting in full from the encyclical here:

“Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others. Indeed, precisely because we experience limits — vulnerability, suffering and failure — we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others. In this same experience, we remain capable of intuiting a fraternity greater than ourselves and of perceiving injustice as a scandal. Authentic culture and art preserve this spark, resisting the normalization of evil. For this reason, certain works have taken on an almost prophetic significance: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony can be seen as a desire for unity; Guernica as a denunciation of dehumanization; Schindler’s List as a call not to consign the past to oblivion.” (#122)

Backrooms may have that “almost prophetic significance” as it brings to unflinching life the consequences of succumbing to one’s own delusions, to the fragmented vision of reality technology tries to keep us in, and ultimately to the most monstrous, carnal elements of our ego. The odd allure of analog horror’s liminal spaces is the same allure of sin. Servant of God Luigi Guissani writes in The Risk of Education that sin is “the fact of identifying our own definitiveness with an idol”. These spaces are initially nostalgic and even comfortingly recognizable. We may cling to the past and fall into old bad habits. What we may not realize amid our delusion is that the place we remember is not the same anymore and, in fact, never was what we have now reconstructed it as and reduced it to. The idol can never be all that we want or need it to be. We become trapped in a liminal space of our own making. Our only way out then is love (and grace), the very thing that the two leads seem incapable of.

Backrooms does not offer transcendence or salvation. Like Guernica, it depicts the suffering and horror of evil as it really is that ought to be a wake-up call to participate in the building of the “civilization of love [that] will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization” (Magnifica Humanitas, #213).

In addition to the underlying ideas of Backrooms, it is a nerve-shredding, jaw-dropping genre epic on purely technical terms. The production design is in contention to be the best ever put to film and the excitement of discovering new variants of the backrooms is one of the experience’s greatest joys. There are several spaces here that will probably permanently remain in my subconscious. The score and sound design are exceptional, too. Director Parsons, gives an incredibly assured and competent debut for a twenty-year-old. The cast is solid, too. Ejiofor and Reinsve turn in expectedly strong takes on outward and inward disintegration. Maxwell and Bennett do the needed work for their minor roles. Mark Duplass has a small yet significant role, too, and is at his skeeziest.

For those on the edge about seeing a horror movie, Backrooms is genuinely scary, but it does have restraint when it comes to graphic violence. Several scenes pull back when they are on the edge. That is not to say it is peaceful, too. I would still not recommend it to anyone who is especially faint of heart.

My current opinion is that Backrooms will be an enduring classic engendering analysis and discussion for decades to come. This is the real deal. If you can handle horror, see Backrooms on the biggest screen possible near you.