If you had to describe a dog to someone who’d never seen one, and then asked them to draw it, would it look like a dog? If they’d never seen an actual dog, could any approximation of what you’d described – 4 legs, 2 ears, wagging tail – get them close enough? And even if it did: would “close enough” to an actual dog just be all the creepier?
This is an image Kane Parsons’s Backrooms keeps circling back to. Is it possible to transmit your interior self to someone else? And if it is, would the result even be recognizable?
Backrooms stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a furniture store owner who spends his days trying to convince customers to come to his sprawling showroom. When he’s not working, he’s drinking, or he’s in therapy with Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), trying to work through the wreckage of a fresh divorce and the lifelong patterns that led him there. In a session with Dr. Kline, we see Clark flash his simmering anger and resentment during a roleplay, only to turn back into a placid and smiling patient when the roleplay is over. We can fix this, Dr. Kline emphasizes, if we learn the patterns and behaviors that have led you here. You don’t have to be alone. But Clark pushes back: what if it’s OK to be this way? What if it’s best to be alone, given the way he is “hard-wired?”
After trying to excavate his mental interior – or perhaps avoid it altogether – Clark stumbles into a new kind of expedition in his furniture store after discovering a faux wall. The opening leads into a sprawling and seemingly unending series of bizarre rooms, filled with yellow lighting and stray pieces of furniture. As he descends further, he goes missing, and Dr. Kline goes into the backrooms to try to bring him home.
Backrooms is the feature debut of Kane Parsons, who created the original YouTube series at 16 and is, at 20, A24’s youngest-ever director. The studio’s bet on him is visible. The first two-thirds of the film are its strongest, lingering on elaborate-yet-sparse set design and the fear it invokes. This is arguably the kind of film where the set does the heaviest lifting of all. At its best, this stretch conjured a specific memory for me. If you’ve seen M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, you might remember a scene where a camcorder is focusing on a still section of street and an alien suddenly walks across the shot. It’s a small moment and the film’s most impactful.
The most successful parts of Backrooms feel like an expansion of this exact type of fear. A still space, a striking figure, and the terror of what is lurking around the corner. Ejiofor is doing real work here, interacting with basically no one for the majority of the movie, and still conjuring the tense horror of watching someone approach a corner you don’t want them to turn.
Ejiofor and Reinsve are giving two very different performances in this film, each equally impactful. Ejiofor plays a man partly absent from his own life – placid surface, simmering interior, and the gap between them. Reinsve plays someone whose composure is itself a construction, a person who has built something to live inside. He’s playing concealment; she’s playing architecture. One of them has been surviving in interiors longer than the other. But even for a professional, our backrooms are often inscrutable. We remember things wrong, we forget things, and the shape of our own interiors is mostly unknowable. The dog metaphor recurses: even the people with the most direct access to their own minds are still drawing crudely and in crayon.
The back third of Backrooms moves away from the tension and fear that built the first two acts and leans further into metaphor, often for the worse. The film stops generating dread and starts explaining itself. Anyone who has seen Alex Garland’s Annihilation will recognize this film’s template: a strange interior space, a survivor extracted, scientists asking her to describe what can’t quite be described. Backrooms handles it more confidently than Annihilation did, but it inherits some of the same problem: once a film commits to articulating its metaphor, the dread that gave the metaphor weight starts to fall away. The momentum of the first two-thirds gets swapped for something a little too navel-gazing, as the film starts narrating its themes instead of embedding them in dread.
Which brings us back to the dog. The film hands you crayons and asks you to draw what it showed you, knowing the drawing will be distorted. Backrooms mostly honors that deal. When it works, it works because the horror and the metaphor are the same thing. When it stops working, it’s because the film forgets they were ever fused, and starts describing the dog out loud instead of letting you draw it.