Kane Parsons’s directorial debut Backrooms gives away enough to be satisfying, little enough to remain utterly terrifying.
In 2002, a furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin was remodeled to prepare for a new tenant. Images of this remodel appeared online in 2003 and one of these images — an empty sprawl of fluorescent lights, yellow walls, and even yellower carpet — would begin to circulate on message boards in 2011. In 2019, an anonymous 4chan user commented on the photo with a 78-word horror story. A screenshot of this exchange went viral, the image and the text became forever linked, and the Backrooms creepypasta was born.
That original yellow room is now a racetrack for remote control cars. Black August, the pseudonymous internet user generally credited with the original short story, has not contributed to any Backrooms media since that initial post. But in 2022, sixteen-year-old Kane Parsons (himself younger than the original Backrooms photograph) decided to focus his knack for 3D animation on producing a short film adaptation, leading to a viral web series. At 17, Kane was hired to produce a feature-length adaptation for A24. Now at age 20, he’s become one of the youngest filmmakers to ever direct a professional studio production.
The good news is that you don’t need to have seen, read, or watched any of this to understand Backrooms. In fact, it won’t even help.
Step inside.
Photo Credit: A24
Backrooms stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a furniture store owner whose bitterness regarding his failed architectural ambitions has cost him his marriage. His therapist Dr. Kline (Renate Reinsve) tries to be supportive, as does his assistant manager Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her videographer boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett). Clark isn’t all that interested in change though, instead slipping deeper into alcoholism and sleeping in the same furniture store he credits with his squandered potential.
One night, Clark sees a glimmer of light shining through a wall in the store. He investigates, slipping through liminal space and discovering an endless labyrinth of yellow rooms and fluorescent lights. He’s not alone there, either. Clark will sometimes catch a glimpse of something big. Something dangerous. Dr. Kline thinks Clark sounds insane, but when he disappears, she must set aside her own demons to seek out the truth in Clark’s stories and determine his fate.
An expansion of terror.
It’s a rare thing for a filmmaker to land the opportunity to make a big (or at least bigger) budget version of their indie passion project. With more than two dozen web series episodes under his belt, Parsons had plenty of Backrooms content to lean on when creating the film. Backrooms the movie is entirely standalone, and thank goodness for that! The stories that creators build inside their heads are often far more vast in scale than what can be publicly seen on any final product, and there’s a natural inclination to over-explain when given the opportunity. Many great stories are prone to being ruined by this. Great horror stories especially so.
Photo Credit: A24
Instead, Parsons forces viewers to spend the entire runtime languishing in the unknown. Backrooms may be in the same world as Parsons’s web series, but having seen every episode of the show will do viewers no favors here, except perhaps in illustrating the ridiculousness of the unfounded rumors that anyone but Parsons directed the film. Backrooms is not quite a slow burn, but not quite fast paced. It is precise. Parsons has a surgical ability to craft and manipulate tension, dragging it out when necessary and diffusing it when it is time to move.
Creepy craftsmanship.
Viewer knowledge would not be an asset on this front, so Parsons instead opts for the utterly disorienting. Plenty of filmmakers could try this and just end up being infuriating, but Parsons manages it with a confidence of a much more experienced director. Everything from the casting to the set design to the practical effects is deliberately crafted to make viewers unsure of what is next, and it’s all done so well that they have no choice other than to sit back and enjoy the ride. Enough answers are offered for the journey to be satisfying, but only just. Because to give away too much would be to undermine the terrifying scope of the phenomenon the characters are up against.
There are plenty more successes to be found. It is extremely impressive how well the film manages the switch in perspective from Clark to Dr. Kline, and the contrast of the terrifying repetition of the Backrooms against the familiar repetition of suburbia somehow manages to sidestep cliche. There are also some small misfires, like Reinsve’s inconsistent accent and the occasional lesser special effects shot. Still, those are relatively minor issues, especially when faced with just how much of the film Parsons manages to knock out of the park.
The bottom line.
I watched this in a packed theater and cannot tell you the last time I saw a horror film where the audience was so engaged and so obviously terrified. The performances, the pacing, and the production are so deeply intertwined that to praise one requires explaining (and praising) the others. For any film, this is a remarkable accomplishment. For a debut feature from a filmmaker who started working on the film when he was still in high school, it is something else entirely. How fortunate we are to have the opportunity to watch Parsons’s career unfold from the ground floor.
Backrooms is now playing in theaters everywhere. Watch the trailer below.
Images courtesy of A24. Read more reviews by Brogan Luke Bouwhuis here.
REVIEW RATING
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Backrooms - 9/10
9/10
Brogan Luke Bouwhuis is a writer and film programmer whose frequent pop culture deep dives have allowed him to write about everything from the Richard Gere gerbil rumor to the history of the holiday yule log video. He co-hosts the Franchise Fiends podcast, co-captains the narrative shorts program at the Slamdance Film Festival, and co-created three children with his wife, Jessica.
