Backrooms

I'm encouraged that a film like this year's BACKROOMS could become such a runaway box office smash.  Granted, it's arguably in that contemporary genre of "elevated horror", more concerned with psychology than gore effects.  Younger folks these days seem to favor this brand of terror.  The big hits in the horror genre in my formative years involved serial killers who employed creative methods of dispatch.  Mostly brain dead thrillers with inane dialogue and gratuitous nude shots.  For every film like THE SHINING there were a few dozen THE BURNINGs or SILENT SCREAMs.  Campy fun, but crap.  BACKROOMS is neither.

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) faces a dismal life as owner of a discount furniture store, the kind where employees don silly costumes in the commercials.  We learn that his career as an architect stalled and his marriage failed.  Enough trauma to necessitate visits to a therapist named Mary (Renate Reinsve) who suffers her own crippling tsusris - dealing with the demolition of her childhood home and her mother's institutionalization.  Perhaps because of these troubles she doesn't seem to be very effective in her work.  Her role playing games with her patient are iffy.  She will be skeptical when Clark one day explains that he has discovered some sort of portal in the store leading to a series of bland, dimly lit backrooms, some filled with curious, familiar artifacts.

Director Kane Parsons' original conception was a series on the Internet that began in 2022.  A "found footage" sort of narrative.  These sort of things rarely interest me, but BACKROOMS explores the ideas of alternate dimensions and "liminal spaces" satisfyingly.  Spaces untethered to linear time or physics, rather more symbolic voids of memory, nostalgia, emotion.  Some terrifying, others merely sad.  Clark, Mary, and a few other unfortunates will delve deeply into said backrooms.  Their discoveries fascinating and deeply unsettling. 

Will Soodik's screenplay, to me at least, is enigmatic enough for a thousand different takes.  Multiple interpretations.  Some will feel theirs is definitive, that certain characters did indeed perish, for example.  Others will feel maybe they are just lost in their own subconscious.  My hot take is that BACKROOMS represents a physical manifestation of the cerebral cortex.  Filled with places that inspire comfort, or dread.  Or both simultaneously.  Don't let me get going on this, the type of analysis you might hear after several rounds or tokes. 

Parsons toys with us nicely.  Greg Ng's editing allows a perfectly deliberate pace.  Enough time for scenes to breathe, to be lived in.  To become uncomfortable.  Deliberate, but rarely dull.  I found one or two echoes of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT here, though this was far less tedious.