It would probably be easier to just go with the nightmare vibe throughout the new horror movie BACKROOMS and enjoy how unsettling almost every visual is in this frightener from the 20-year-old YouTube director Kane Parsons. You heard that right, and despite his youth and lack of big-screen experience, he’s made a disturbing and enthralling movie with enough nightmarish visuals and insinuating sound design to give anyone the heebie-jeebies. And Parsons has even managed to do something fresh and new, designating a strip mall furniture store as his version of a haunted house, one that is eerie, ugly, and terrifying.
Periodically, characters try to explain what they think is going on in these backrooms, and I have a theory as well, but the film works best if you don’t overthink it and just let yourself give in to the mood and atmosphere created by Parsons’ discomforting world-building.
The story concerns a bitter ex-architect named Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) stuck managing a cheap furniture store in a strip mall in an ugly, Valley-esque part of Southern California circa 1990. To make matters even worse, the name of the store is Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, and Clark must even dress up like a crusty old pirate to do the commercials for it on local television. He seems to be living in this hellish place after hours, too, as we learn that his wife threw him out of their house for his surly drunkenness. Indeed, we see him drinking booze right from the bottle while watching TV from one of the store’s bedroom displays.
He admits his problems to his psychologist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), even though he thinks his temper is justified in chasing his lazy wife away. Mary is as calm and collected as he is agitated and rageful. Therapy doesn’t seem to be helping him much, but it may be helping Mary feel more secure in her world. We’re shown a flashback to her childhood early in the film as she and her mother watch their family home being bulldozed to make way for new construction. Mary even saves a piece of the sidewalk as a memento, or maybe more like a security blanket.
Soon enough, the restless Clark is all the more irked by the store’s lighting problems. The garish fluorescents keep going on and off at all hours of the day and night. One evening, while investigating an outage, he notices light coming through a wall from whatever is behind it. His investigation leads him to discover that he can actually walk through the wall, where he discovers a whole new, weird world of dozens upon dozens of nightmarish backrooms. They look like empty strip mall office spaces and are decorated with various accouterments, from his store’s furnishings to dirty laundry to Christmas displays.
Terrified but curious, Clark will become obsessed with these backrooms and pull his employees, Kat and Bobby (Lukita Maxwell and Finn Bennett), into his exploration of them. Eventually, he implores his psychologist to see what is going on there as well. Mary reluctantly goes down the same rabbit hole after Clark disappears, and it is in her scene, where she enters the backrooms to start her own investigation, that the protagonist role shifts to that of the good doctor.
She soon discovers the same nightmare scenario that Clark lost himself in – a world filled with the endless buzz of those nasty fluorescents, never-ending yellow walls, all kinds of furniture, and junk. It’s a maze filled with some mysterious and menacing type of creatures as well. Explanations are trotted out that try to explain what we’re seeing, but the backrooms feel all the more villainous left alone without easy answers.
The film should spark debate for years, with critics and fans alike trying to explain what it’s all about. I myself don’t think what is behind the evil matters as much as that there is evil afoot, and it’s chosen suburbia as the place to dabble in the affairs of man.
Indeed, if there is any obvious answer here that Parsons is imploring us to consider, it’s that too often the roofs we have over our heads aren’t enough solace to give us comfort in a dreadful world. Nor are our jobs, friends, or family. We may think we’re secure, but just below the surface or behind a wall lies a living nightmare.
Scary thought, isn’t it?
