The liminal spaces - a byproduct of the ever progressing, expanding capitalist world - the mall, corporate offices, underground subway stations, hospital wards, suburban cul-de-sacs, innercity public parks, abandoned housing have been the subject or background for numerous films, most notably, the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and J-horror auteurs in the 90s and 2000s, the Berlin School filmmakers of the 2000s - Petzold, Arslan, Schanelec, Köhler. These filmmakers delved into the anxiety of living in the modern world where mundane reality is just as scary as spirits and monsters.
Backrooms creator Kane Parsons, a teen who grabbed and expanded the now famous 4-chan meme of an empty old furniture store with eerie yellow walls and fluorescent overhead lights, made series of contents entirely using Blender and Aftereffects, where endless corridors leads you to nowhere and some unknown creature chasing you. Banking on digital pixel nostalgia and shaky POV camera of the 90s indie boom, Parsons helped create an urban lore where the Gen-Zers can congregate online.
Seeing the potential for the internet liminal horror on social media and videogames cum movie successes (the most recent example would be Skinamarink, Exit 8), A24 gave Kane Parsons, now a 20 years old, 10 million dollars to make a feature film with legit actors - Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. The result is a noble first attempt, albeit an underwhelming one.
Ejiofor plays Clark, who owns a failing furniture store - Captain Clark's Ottoman Empire (its confusing, discordant name is pointed out by his young part-time employees), in a strip mall in suburban southern California. He is an aspiring architect who is unhappy with life's disappointment. He regularly has sessions with his therapist Mary (Reinsve) where he reveals his past - his failure in life turned him into drinking and his wife left him. He has anger issues. In turn, Mary has her own demons, as seen in spurts of flashbacks and nightmares - her mentally unstable mother prevented her from going out and they become shut-ins (newspapers covering the entire windows kind), in their now demolished apartment. She wrote a book about opening windows in life which Clark religiously listens to (as an audio book on a tape).
Clark finds the backrooms by accident while sleeping in his furniture store showroom, when flickering overhead store lights lead him to check the circuit breakers, then discovers a sliver of light beaming through the basement wall. He marks the entrance with a blue painter's tape and recruits his two young employees, armed with a video camera and ropes to investigate the endless labyrinth of the backroom. And it goes horribly wrong.
Mary stops in the furniture store, after Clark misses his appointment and leaves a cryptic message on her phone. She finds Clark has been mapping the labyrinth of backrooms. And he encourages her to explore with him.
There is so much potential in Backrooms. The dizzying labyrinth, much of it actually physically built for the film, is impressive for its originality and surrealism - the impossible angles, strange walkways, ominous dark corners & random piles of furniture. With the help of eerie sound design and score, Backrooms provide some very unsettling vibes. The creature designs give some very scary moments also. And the implication of the creatures and scattered clothes and furniture and absurd landscape that these are our memories of a place, warped over the years by misremembering and misinterpretation, is an intriguing one.
But if Skinamarink was any indication, you can't make a feature film just with the vibe alone, unless it's short, jumbled youtube clips intended to be unnerving, with no need for narrative threads or any coherence. Here, the narratives/character backgrounds are forced and uninteresting. By the time the abrupt ending rolls around, Backroom feels like a missed opportunity - you want more of the backroom explorations, not the underdeveloped, stereotypical characters. The film is a 1990s digital nostalgia, remembered, reimagined by a 20-year-old who didn't live through the timeframe, instead, grew up on the internet and videogames. It's just vibes, distorted and context free, just like the inhabitants of the backrooms. But just like the original digital catnip Parsons created, I want more.
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