Backrooms review: 'properly creepy'
Precocious filmmaking talent Kane Parsons takes the hackneyed trauma narrative that powers so much horror and transforms it into something genuinely exciting in Backrooms, writes Alistair Harkness
Backrooms (15) ★★★★★
If Obsession’s 26-year-old director Curry Barker seemed like a precocious talent, Backrooms filmmaker Kane Parsons is even more of a horror phenom. Just 20 years old, he’s also come through YouTube, securing himself an impressive set of patrons in the form Insidious director James Wan and hipster US studio A24 for this debut effort based on his own gone-viral found-footage web series about a creepy and mysterious liminal space that traps people in its maze-like environs.
Set sometime in the early 1990s, it stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as the disgruntled owner of a discount furniture shop who finds an entry point into the titular backrooms in the basement of his store.
Though the cold open — shot on authentically low-res VHS — establishes something sinister (and possibly government-related) lurking in the sterile, strip-lit, office-like space, Ejiofor’s character, Clark, brings his own demons into the rooms, which may or may not amplify his insecurities regarding his personal and professional failings. These emerge in therapy sessions with a psychiatrist (played by Worst Person in the World’s Renate Reinsve), whose own abusive childhood — seen via judicious use of flashbacks — leads her to investigate Clark’s crazy sounding claims about the mysterious rooms for herself… with freaky results.
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Though at heart it’s a film about the damage we do to ourselves and others by holding on to the past, Parsons transforms the hackneyed trauma narrative that powers so much horror into something properly creepy. Co-writing the script with Will Soodik, he has confidence to burn, diligently building up atmosphere and character so that when proceedings get seriously weird in the final act it feels likes he’s enriching the mystery, not just amping it up for the sake of it.
Like Obsession, though, what’s also exciting is just seeing young filmmaking talent bursting through with something that speaks to their generation thematically and visually. Too many people have been writing cinema’s obituary since the pandemic; in the space of a few weeks Parsons and Barker have shown it’s in rude health for the foreseeable future.
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