The Reel Review
The owner of a struggling furniture store in 1990 California discovers a mysterious portal in the building’s basement to a series of connected rooms containing repressed traumas and rage, sparking the concern of his therapist, who is dealing with her own childhood traumas. Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) and Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value) star in this psychological horror adapted by co-writer/director Kane Parsons from his YouTube short film series.
There are several things that Backrooms does well – it creates an escalating sense of dread through a stark, dull yellow color labyrinth filled with what feels like hidden dangers around every corner; it has a chilling, creepy score; and it dabbles in metaphors about selective and repressed memories through the use of creepy humanoid replicas, whose features resemble the glitchy memory of the person it once was. The film also has committed performances from its two leads that far outpace the wafer-thin source material.
The story, however, is where Backrooms falls woefully short. It is one thing to turn an interesting metaphor into a series of spooky YouTube shorts, and quite another to turn it into a feature length film. Backrooms appears to aspire to be like Inception, but with its unsatisfying third act, unfortunately feels more like the super disappointing 2023 supernatural horror Skinamarink, just with a bigger budget. Still, it will be interesting to see how its young creator hones his craft in the years to come.
REEL FACTS
• Backrooms started as a concept by Kane Parsons in 2019 in a 4-chan thread featuring an original image of Rohner’s Furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin before becoming a series of YouTube short films in 2022.
• At 19, Kane Parsons became A24’s youngest director, starting production after graduating high school, and with a $10 million budget created a film that earned more than $400 million, making it A24’s highest grossing film ever.
• The production built about 30,000 square feet of Backrooms, which led some crew members occasionally getting lost and becoming disoriented on set.
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