Backrooms is an M.C. Escher nightmare come to life.

    There are as many layers to Kane Parsons’ Backrooms as there are in the film’s endless, extra-dimensional maze of liminal spaces. It is, at its heart, the story of a divorced, alcoholic furniture store owner in dire financial and emotional straits, juxtaposed with the troubled past of his therapist and her (possibly) crazy mother. It is one part science fiction, one part horror, and two parts psychological thriller,  a thought-provoking fever dream that’ll keep you talking about it into the next day.

            Clark, a divorced, alcoholic owner of a furniture store he’s in danger of losing, discovers a doorway to a parallel universe on its bottom floor, the discovery of which gives Clark new purpose. An architect by training, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is fascinated, eventually obsessed with the “backrooms,” as it were, for unlike the Upside Down of Stranger Things, which is a topsy-turvy mirror image of our world with lost of creepy, slimy roots all over this place, the backrooms are an endless maze of rooms, hallways, and dead ends – including doors and stairways to nowhere that makes the Winchester House look like a simple studio apartment. There are also curious vestiges of the “real world” in the backrooms – at times there are aspects of them that look like Clark’s store, and other parts that have incomplete pieces of furniture, backwards stop signs, malevolently stacked furniture, and more mind-bending puzzles, geometric oddities, and architectural impossibilities. Oh, and there’s some scary, creepy stuff wandering about, mostly unseen at first, too.

            There is much about Backrooms that is extremely effective. There is just something extremely unnerving about the maze of plain yellow wallpapered hallways, accentuated by clever use of practical camera work and creepy sound effects. The stark isolation, mind-numbing confusion, and lack of logic to the place is naturally unnerving, especially when shown in “found footage” taken by the characters with video cameras. People that suffer from claustrophobia beware – there are some extremely unnerving scenes where characters have to crawl through dark, tight liminal spaces, usually while being pursued by some kind of monster.

            Clark’s story is juxtaposed alongside Mary’s (Renate Reinsve), his therapist, who has struggled mostly unsuccessfully to get Clark to see his own role in the unraveling of his life, all the while flashing back to memories of her as a child with her mentally ill mother, whose story may, or may not, tie into the broader phenomenon of the backrooms.

            Backrooms, like some films, actually suffers a bit when the curtain is finally pulled back and some – not all – of the mystery is revealed. The identity of the entity that has been hunting everyone, when revealed, is odd, even a bit silly. Clark’s story at first, that of a broken man given fresh purpose by discovering something bigger than himself, something he cannot understand, pivots to him being an all-in devotee of the backrooms a little too quickly for me. That being said, the climax, when Mary, who goes looking for Clark, and he reunite in the backrooms, you get some of the cringiest, spookiest parts of the movie.

            The film Backrooms is the result of a Creepypasta phenomenon, one I was not aware of, which illustrates the creativity and ingenuity of the film. Backrooms is scary, innovative, and thought-provoking, and this likely won’t be the last time we visit them …