By Beloved by passionate corners of the internet, BACKROOMS, directed by Kane Parsons, creator of the original YouTube series, quickly garnered attention not only because of its popular forum origins, but because the creator was just 17 when approached by A24 to adapt the project. Despite the fact that the film has quickly become the most popular release from the company, it arrived with a lot of criticism from fans who held high hopes, and in many ways, rightfully so.
The film follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a divorced furniture salesman who has now dedicated himself to his work and is the face of the company via his pirate character. Still troubled by the issues he had with his wife, Clark seeks therapy, where he finds unrest lying below the surface. After he discovers an unmarked room that leads to another dimension within the furniture store, he goes missing for days, pulling others into the madness through his convincing and their own accidental discovery. This is the crux of the true conversation behind the movie: the real horrors of trying to live out a perfect domestic fantasy in the world that we have been left with—subjected to an economy that’s worse than we’ve seen in decades and expecting families to survive, becoming more married to how productivity represents you than the very people that we love. What could very well have been a commentary on what it means to be blue-collar, especially in the current climate, instead loses that beating heart very early on, convoluted and stagnated by its own concept.
It’s undeniable that Parsons creates an irresistible atmosphere, but he doesn’t give us enough of the very thing that pulled us in. The physical space of the Backrooms is a testament to how much work went into recreating Parsons’ visions, combining large-scale production with his signature Blender assets (the same open-source software used to create the original video series). Once Clark summons two other people into those massively constructed Backrooms (only to get chased by an evil creature), the film enters its strongest moments. This found footage stretch is the true embodiment of this project and why its popularity has spanned like it has, with countless unlicensed video games made with the structure of “getting chased in the Backrooms by an evil creature.” Most chilling is when Clark enters one of the pool rooms and gets attacked by an unnamed entity who’s picked up his camera. Give me more of that skincrawling found footage. Sure, afterwards you get lingering moments with Clark in the shadows, and inanimate, uncanny beings, but they don’t land with the same visceral entrapment of this centerpiece sequence.
The closest BACKROOMS envelops us in the struggles of its characters within this fluorescent, boundless hellscape that’s almost as bad as being overstimulated in your local TJ Maxx is the way in which characters are followed by their internal demons. As many have pointed out, it’s suspected that one of the uncanny beings is a copy of Clark’s wife. While this hasn’t been confirmed directly, it is something to lean into, especially when Renate Reinsve’s therapist character, Mary, has an off-kilter version of herself created by simply stepping into the space. The copies call into question who we truly are; what parts of ourselves are we not willing to examine unless they are put right in front of our faces?
And yet, I found myself frustrated at what the movie devolved into, finishing with a large pirate version of Clark chasing after Mary, not to mention eating Clark himself. Sure, people want to avoid their problems, but this just doesn’t fully land. BACKROOMS feels too singularly focused on its characters, which can typically be a strength, but here, what’s beloved is the setting. It certainly poses the audience with an interesting world that I hope to see explored more deeply in the future, but so many avenues went unexplored; they could have added depth to their survival attempts, integrating the widely documented rules established by Internet users who bolstered the folklore in the first place, namely trusting your gut instincts and never ignoring them. If anything, this would play directly into Clark’s character, but instead we are left to wander without these conventions, leaving us with an aimless trajectory. BACKROOMS feels like a project still trying to find its footing within the wider scale of its screen adaptation, and while it has some of the moving parts and certainly some of the intrigue, there’s work that needs to be done.
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