Backrooms

Whether you do or don't like the act of watching a horror movie, it's hard to find someone who hasn't become fascinated by the worlds the genre creates. It could be a post apocalypse where survival is tussling with rotting monsters hungry for your brains. It could be a dark reflection of our own reality, where a man summons the souls of children back to life through animatronics. Or, it could be the creation of a collection of minds. An endless, liminal space, which makes even the most subdued office environment suddenly a point of terror.

The Backrooms are not the creation of any one person. At least, the person who originally wrote the greentext that spawned them is not the same person who made the A24 movie. Kane Parsons admits he is just one storyteller within the Backrooms universe, but thanks to his YouTube videos he has been a massive part of legitimising the internet creation as an unsettling space, where our darkest nightmares lurk around every corner. At just 19, he was given $10 million by A24 and the task of making Backrooms into more than just another internet iceberg you can spend hours delving into.

Suffice to say, Parsons has exceeded expectations, making a movie that avoids getting bogged down in the weight of Backrooms lore, instead focusing primarily on just two characters: Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Mary, played by Renate Reinsve. Clark is a down-on-his-luck furniture salesman who once dreamed of becoming an architect. Mary is his therapist, helping him work through his drinking, his frustrations, and his patterns of self-destruction. The script from Will Soodik is tight, leaving a lot of things unsaid, having faith that the viewer is smart enough and paying enough attention between the moments where they'd rather have their eyes covered that they'll understand the internal conflicts within Clark and Mary, and the significance of the individual baggage they're carrying. Backrooms isn't just about transporting us to a space where the lights flicker and the walls are yellow. It's worth ditching the lore that's going to impress internet fans for a better movie, and Backrooms accomplishes this with ease.

The film still takes us to the Backrooms, and when it does, it instantly takes a horribly unsettling turn. I'm not usually a horror person, so perhaps I've just not got the chops to comment on what's really scary and what isn't, but Backrooms makes you so uncomfortable, playing with your imagination to keep you tense each time you hear that dull buzz of the office lights staying on, that there are times you can only look away to stop your heart thumping. There's a bit of discourse online about the film not making use of traditionally scary horror tactics, but the way Backrooms makes you expect the worst each time a character turns a corner in the liminal space will stay with me more than a wickedly smiling ghost lady coated in black makeup staring at me through a window. The use of the real set and the Backrooms' space is incredibly well done by everyone involved. The environment is incredibly claustrophobic, and there's always a dark spot or a unexplored corner where anything could be lurking. The unknown in Backrooms might be a tad scarier than the entities we see at the end, but the chase of the final leg of the movie is an adrenaline-packed scare ride, even when we know what we're dealing with.

There's a lot of deliberate choices in Backrooms that come together to make an incredibly well-crafted whole. The set design doesn't just opt for creepy office space, the acting is all-in even if it's "just an internet horror movie," the use of space or the lack of it, the flashbacks, the music and audio. It feels like every element of the movie was meticulously put together in a way that's incredibly impressive, even if I will probably not be putting myself through the experience of watching it again for a considerable amount of time. What's even more compelling is how not everything needs to take place in the dark for Backrooms to make it terrifying. Some of the key shots I remember from the movie all take place under that glaring artificial light, ever flickering above the confines of the misremembered alternate dimension.

If there was one thing about Backrooms I would have changed, it would be the pacing of the final thirty minutes of the movie. It feels like we steadily build and build the tension, only for the last leg to feel like it's running out of time. Another five or ten minutes could have given the film a bit more time to explore, and iron out some more details with the characters it might have been nice to see. As it stands, I feel Mary was left a little underdeveloped as a person. Clark is an excellently written and performed character, but his shift throughout the movie again feels like it comes with a bit of whiplash, almost like the last leg of the film is a tacked-on element, with a small but important piece missing in the middle. Otherwise, Backrooms is an incredibly well-produced, written, shot, and acted movie, with horror that'll truly unsettle you, even if the idea of The Office but scary might not sound terrifying on paper.