There is a peculiar kind of dread unique to liminal spaces: those transitional, in-between places stripped of human warmth and meaning, corridors and rooms that recede without end.
Kane Parsons has spent years mapping this particular anxiety on YouTube, and at just 20 years old he brings it to the big screen for A24 in a debut feature that is, at its finest moments, genuinely unsettling.
Set in the early 1990s, the film follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a former architect reduced to managing a cavernous discount furniture store with the grimly self-mocking name of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. He sleeps in the display beds. He films dopey pirate-themed adverts for local television. He attends sessions with a therapist called Mary (Renate Reinsve), a softly spoken woman wrestling with her own troubled past. Both are people who have somehow misplaced their lives, and Ejiofor and Reinsve bring considerable weight to that particular sadness.
The film shifts register entirely when Clark discovers that a section of wall in the store’s basement opens onto something quite different: a vast, apparently boundless network of rooms, corridors and non-spaces. Yellow-tinted walls. Stained carpets. Furniture arranged without logic. Will Soodik’s screenplay treats the backrooms with admirable ambiguity, declining to commit fully to whether this is a supernatural phenomenon or a projection of psychological collapse, and that uncertainty is the film’s greatest asset.
Parsons shows genuine confidence behind the camera. Cinematographer Jeremy Cox creates a suffocating visual grammar, and one sequence late in the second act is liable to lodge itself in the memory for some time. The found-footage passages, digitally recreated to resemble degraded VHS without any actual analogue equipment, are impressively handled.
The trouble comes when the screenplay shifts its weight from atmosphere to allegory. The backrooms are most compelling as pure, unexplained strangeness; they lose something when pressed into service as a metaphor for Clark’s failures or Mary’s unresolved grief. Myth tends to lose its power once explained, and Parsons, a filmmaker of obvious promise, occasionally mistakes psychological exposition for genuine depth.
For all that, Backrooms is a striking debut: imperfect, intermittently brilliant, and rooted in a visual imagination that feels distinctly its own.
Header: © Kane Parsons
