For a horror movie derived from a concept as singularly contemporary as an internet myth, A24’s Backrooms is grounded in a mourning for lost things that could only be called conservative.
Like its foundational web-based myth — which, as far as I can tell from my position as one relatively estranged from internet subcultures, refers to the existence of a bewilderingly complex series of seemingly unused rooms adjacent to retail establishments — Backrooms summons fears of hidden places where few legitimate exits present themselves. Scary stuff, no?
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To his credit, though, director Kane Parsons — elaborating on his own YouTube series of the same title — has enlarged his film’s emotional palette. He means not just to induce fright but to encourage lament: for the early 1990s, when the new movie is set; for decaying strip malls and dying furniture stores, to which the backrooms here are affixed; and for the passing away of all structures, however cheap or shoddy, that hold meaning for us.
In the latter category is the childhood home of Mary (Renate Reinsve), a psychiatrist who confidently expounds her therapeutic philosophy in her sessions with clients and on late-night TV commercials promoting her self-help audio cassette tapes. That Mary herself, enveloped in her generously proportioned sofa and sitting before a literal TV tray with an actual TV dinner on top of it, watches one of her own commercials is a sign that her emotional wellness may be in doubt.
So is the moment early in the film when Mary mournfully looks on as her long-ago home faces demolition to make room for a big, featureless residential complex. From the rubble, she retains a chunk of the sidewalk, in which, when the pavement was wet an eternity ago, she once placed her hands. The film’s sense of the emotional impact of buildings coming down is as palpable as it is in Louis Malle’s great film about the declining Boardwalk, Atlantic City (1980).
Among Mary’s clients is Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), whose life is a litany of dissatisfactions: He is aggrieved at his ex-wife for her professional ambitions, and he is resentful of his lot as the unsuccessful proprietor of a spectacularly tacky furniture store called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, since he once fancied himself as an architect. Ejiofor, best known for Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013), has his most memorable role in eons as Clark, who plausibly careens between hope, rage, and curiosity. Equally believable is director Parsons’s evocation of ’90s-era furnishings, including elephantine sectionals, massive recliners, and cheaply produced desks, shelves, and such. The sight in the furniture store of rolled-up rugs propped in a corner is a nightmare in and of itself.
Curiosity is what leads Clark to first poke around the basement of his store. Dismayed by an ever-increasing pile of past-due bills, Clark surmises that his high electric charges emanate from unexplained power spikes on the lower level. In fact, the breaker panel has been tinkered with in an unprofessional manner, but the real problem is that a veritable undiscovered country exists beneath Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire: the backrooms.
When Clark first traverses the backrooms, accessible through a solid-looking but actually porous portion of a basement wall, the film is at its most alarming. The backrooms are disturbing in their particulars — with stacks of furniture arranged ominously (like the “symmetrical book stacking” in Ghostbusters?), corridors lit inconsistently, and spaces that defy logic and even geometry, such as a room that narrows to a tiny door with multiple knobs. Anyone watching the film for the first time will gasp each time Clark enters the backrooms for fear he will never plot a course back out.
Early on, though, Clark not only freely enters and exits the backrooms but rather recklessly invites guests, including his recalcitrant videographers Bobby (Finn Bennett) and Kat (Lukita Maxwell) — they’re the ones responsible for his store’s over-the-top TV ads. In the immediate aftermath of discovering what seems to be either a construction error or an alternate dimension, Clark admits the existence of the backrooms to Mary, who is, naturally, disbelieving. (Fleetingly, one wonders why Clark does not inform his landlord, the police, or any available Men in Black.) Nonetheless, after Clark has seemingly gone off the grid, Mary cannot suppress her own curiosity and she, too, makes the trek to Cap’n Clark’s and, inevitably, the backrooms.
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There follows a series of terrifying set pieces, which grow ever more gruesome as the movie unfolds. Pick your poison: Are you more scared by a scene involving cannibalism or a larger-than-life incarnation of the pirate mascot of Cap’n Clark’s giving chase to Mary through a hopelessly complex maze? In an attempt to tether these strange goings-on to something like reality, the film introduces a subplot involving an implausibly powerful medical equipment company that has discovered the backrooms and apparently has the mandate to oversee them. In these scenes, the movie starts to resemble a ’70s conspiracy thriller like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) or Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974), though without the real-world resonance (or classiness) of those great movies.
In fact, these last-act twists are not as powerful as the quiet truth beneath the movie: The reason why the backrooms pull in Clark and later Mary is not because our protagonists have a death wish but because they are fascinated by the archeology behind even the most quotidian commercial landscapes in America. Ask any “dead malls” YouTuber: In a certain light, those empty rooms, hallways, and storefronts are homey.
Peter Tonguette is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
