Backrooms: Review
Hallway to hell
Ever thought that directing a film was an old man’s game? Think again. After creating the viral ‘Backrooms’ short series on Youtube four years ago, 20-year-old Kane Parsons was given the keys to direct his brand of uncanny horror in a feature length A24 film. The result, while thin in terms of plotting, is a thrilling experience that translates impressively to the big screen.
The idea of backrooms originally came from an anonymous 4chan user, representing a never-ending passage of liminal, office-like hallways lurking with menace. Think of it as a Severance-esque hidden world not meant for human eyes. This space is the focus of a thrillingly tense early scene, where a found-footage recording is stalked by an entity in the shadows.
Adapting his own series, Parsons and co-writer Will Soodik situate this idea within the mundanity of midlife crisis. We follow Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the alcoholic manager of an underperforming furniture store with a degrading pirate/ottoman theme. Ruing his failed architecture dreams and a relationship breakdown with his wife, Clark bears all to his therapist Mary, (Renate Reinsve) a woman troubled by unsettling dreams of her own. During a night sleeping at his store, Clark unwittingly steps through a portal into the backrooms – a bright yellow alternative dimension made up of mazey hallways.
Is this all a figment of Clark’s imagination? What are those mysterious sounds behind the walls? Why on earth is Mary led to follow him? As Clark delves deeper into this labyrinthine world, the film plays on the fear of what we don’t know. A masterpiece in Danny Vermette’s set design and Jeremy Cox’s cinematography transforms innocuous office hallways into a real source of unease. When Clark recruits two of his employees (Lukita Maxwell and Finn Bennett) to record the hidden depths of the space, it results in a gloriously frightful sequence where your stress levels will be tested.
After the tense early build-up, the film’s revelations don’t quite match up to the uneasy anticipation. Eijiofor and Reinsve are worthy leads, more than capable of elevating the material – he the picture of masculine crises, she the concerned observer coming to terms with past trauma. But the film’s slight plot and subtext is blown exposed in a final act that isn’t as interesting as what went before it.
While it’s a bit rough around the edges, what Parsons masters is a creepy, Lynchian vibe and plenty of twisted ideas. Effectively evoking the feeling of a living nightmare (aided by Edo Van Breeman’s unsettling score), it will leave you with plenty of things to discuss when the credits roll. Not bad for a 20-year-old.
With enough eerie thrills to justify its transition from short to feature film, Backrooms is a tense psychological horror and an assured directorial debut that should open plenty of doors for Kane Parsons.
★★★★



















