Before we saw “Backrooms,” my friend Chris—like myself, a Bay Area boy from between Oakland and Silicon Valley—said that when he told his coworkers about the Backrooms, they thought they were a seedy strip club. Ironically, the movie was directed by a Bay Area wunderkind who’s legally an adult, but not seasoned enough just yet to enter most adult establishments.
The Backrooms began as a popular meme, evoking dread through its color palette (literature majors will make a connection to the classic 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman) and the analog emptiness of the “liminal spaces” aesthetic, later adopted by YouTuber Kane Parsons.
Parsons directed multiple Backrooms videos, fleshing out a retro sci-fi conspiracy universe—which arthouse distributor A24 (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) loved enough to commission Parsons to direct a feature adaptation, with plenty of big-name producers attached (Osgood Perkins, James Wan, Shawn Levy).
“There’s a lot of simplicity in the setup that preys on the anxiety people have around the stage of industrialization we’re at,” Parsons (who was 17 when A24 hired him) recently told The New York Times. Simplicity, yes, but with labyrinthine physical sets in and around Vancouver, B.C., modeling both the Backrooms and their newest portal from the real world: a furniture store in San Jose, circa 1990.
In “Backrooms,” Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as “Cap’n” Clark, who rules his “Ottoman Empire” with cheesy pirate-themed TV commercials. It’s a milieu that will be familiar to Bay Area kids of a certain age, who may remember similar ads for Connolly’s Furniture in Fremont, often featuring the Connollys as superheroes.
Parsons doesn’t just capture the topography of the Bay Area (the East Bay hills looming large and grassy behind Clark’s store, the odd palm trees and seagulls in several shots). He also nails the 1990 aesthetic with bulky TV’s, vintage BMW’s and Tauruses, and even an “End Apartheid” T-shirt.
The evocative period details make “Backrooms” a spiritual successor to Jordan Peele’s “Us” (2019), which is also required viewing for all Bay Area kids, with its NorCal setting and eerily endless tunnels. In a similar vein, the Backrooms fascinate with peculiar layouts that don’t quite fit the “abandoned office” vibe, with curved doorways and narrow slides leading into rooms that look like they belong in broken homes.
While those environs grip you with elemental dread, they lead to a very abrupt ending. Parsons may have made enough short films to spawn a franchise (despite denying a report that he’s seeking a screenwriter for a sequel), but here, it feels as if he defaulted to his short-form instincts, rather than winding the whole ride down in more cinematic fashion.
That said, when Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) role-plays Clark’s estranged wife in therapy, she calls him out for always needing to “wind down” (i.e. getting drunk and coming home at all hours). Though it’s a truism that most men would benefit from more therapy, Clark’s anguish runs deep enough to demand more specialized care, with the eldritch Backrooms exacerbating his condition(s) to a frightening degree.
Mary, meanwhile, becomes the film’s stealth protagonist, especially when a twist (or two) makes itself known. Clark may tell us what’s traumatized him, but Mary’s troubled past is shown (via flashbacks to her abusive mother trapping them both in the house).
Despite these layers of backstory, “Backrooms” is at its best when it is at its most minimalist. An excellent vibe curator, Parsons expands on the nightmares he tapped into with his original shorts, even supplying parts of the disquieting soundtrack (having spent his adolescence building up his profile as synthwave musician “Kane Pixels”).
Ultimately, it’s the nightmare side of the story that reveals just how deeply Parsons has permeated our collective imagination—particularly when the camera descends through increasingly unfurnished copies of the same living room (the basis of the first teaser trailer), similar to my friend Chris’s own Backrooms dream.
That dream began in our childhood mall (long since half abandoned and demolished), only for the elevator to take Chris 20 stories underground and deposit him in a hallway with “Motel 8” lighting (as he put it) and all sorts of shady shenanigans in each room…plus one grizzled old guy telling him, “I’ve been here 30 years.”
Parsons, of course, has only been on this planet for 20 years, but he’s got many more ahead of him to do the Bay Area proud. And if I ever meet him, I would surely need to ask: Did he, like me, see “Forbidden Planet” (1956) as a kid? Because his latest visions of Backrooms monsters make a man wonder….
