Alice tumbled down a rabbit hole; Lucy wandered through a wardrobe. For Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the middle-aged man-child protagonist of the new thriller “Backrooms,” the portal to another dimension lies in a strip-mall furniture outlet in California’s Santa Clara Valley. Clark owns the store, a depressingly pirate-themed affair called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, and it’s about as successful as his recently ended marriage. He needs an escape from this reality, and he finds it, one sleepless night, in the store’s basement-level showroom. Slipping through a wall like a ghost, he enters a maze of the disquietingly mundane—a wasteland of beige carpets, moldering yellow wallpaper, and buzzing fluorescent-light fixtures. Does Clark do the sensible thing, turn around, and flee this nine-to-five Narnia? He does not. A former architect, he wanders, fascinated, around corners and through crawl spaces, taking particular note of the furniture, much of which is drably interchangeable with his store’s wares. In one cavernous room, chairs, barstools, halogen lamps, and storage units have been stacked atop one another, as if someone had been trying to erect a barricade—but who, or what, is being kept at bay?
The twenty-year-old director Kane Parsons envisions the Backrooms as a way station of the inexplicably familiar, where our terror arises less from jump scares (though there are a few) than from a droning, dread-soaked ambience. Like the recent Japanese video-game adaptation “Exit 8,” which transformed a subway station into a nightmarish, white-tiled infinity loop, “Backrooms” is an ingeniously contoured exercise in liminal horror. It is also—despite, or perhaps owing to, some self-consciously analog touches—a slick and sophisticated piece of cinematic refurbishment. The concept of the Backrooms originated in 2019, in a 4chan post featuring a low-grade photograph of a yellowing office space and a vivid text description of “approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.” Thus was born a creepypasta—a term that does not mean a plate of squid-ink farfalle but, rather, a freaky urban legend, built for online dissemination. In 2022, Parsons, then a teen-ager, made a short film, “The Backrooms (Found Footage),” and uploaded it to his YouTube channel. It became a viral sensation, spawning a more than twenty-episode web series and eventually this movie, with Parsons in the director’s chair.
The feature-length “Backrooms,” which was written by Will Soodik, is essentially a more ambitious, bigger-budget extension of the series. It’s 1990, and the production design, by Danny Vermette, evokes the period with a marvellously ugly specificity: floppy disks and fax machines, chunky gray computers and TV sets, and lumpy floral-patterned sofas straight out of a Bob Barker-era “The Price Is Right” display. It’s a sad backdrop for a sad story: Clark, recently kicked out of his house, has taken to sleeping in his own showroom. His attitude is at once desperate, indignant, and entitled. Meeting with his shrink, Mary (Renate Reinsve), he opens up about his drinking problem, but also rages against his ex-wife, claiming that he was their sole provider for years. Parsons films the therapy session with a detachment that mimics Mary’s calm and mocks Clark’s anger; here, we can tell, is a man who demands respect, especially from women.
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