Backrooms and all the images you see in this review are owned by A24
Directed by Kane Parsons
William Goldman said that nobody knows anything in Hollywood, and the best can you hope for, if you’re lucky, is that you’re making educated guesses. I’d like to expand upon that idea and say that anyone who says they know anything about Hollywood knows less than most or are trying to sell you on a different story entirely. The release of this movie and other high profile, and highly profitable, films from the YouTube scene has certainly got people talking about the future of cinema; Never mind that the biggest hit of last year was a studio adaptation of Minecraft by a well-known director or that the biggest movie of this year is an animated kids movie based on a licensed property. I’m certainly happy whenever young talent gets a chance to break into Hollywood, especially if they come from unconventional backgrounds, but the hype around this movie after its strong box office opening was quite a thing to behold. I guess the quality of the movie is immaterial at this point given how much money it made and how much press it garnered, but is there a good movie to be found once you cut through all the noise, or is the hype surrounding it a far more interesting than the film itself? Let’s find out!!
Down on his luck furniture salesman Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is having a tough time dealing with his failing furniture store and his much more quickly failing marriage. His therapist Dr. Kline (Renate Reinsve) is doing her best to help him through his issues, but Clark seems to be far beyond the reach of anyone around him and is more intent on managing his store and maintaining his little world. Perhaps that’s what drew The Backrooms to his shop, or perhaps it was just a coincidence. Either way, he finds a mysterious doorway in the basement that leads to a series of yellow rooms with disquieting furniture and illogical architecture. His obsession with exploring this place is so great that others get dragged into this strange world and potentially to danger as something seems to be down there with them. What does Clark hope to find in these mysterious hallways, and will he regret his decision to seek it out? Can Dr. Kline save him from his own obsessions, or have The Backrooms claimed his as a victim? I mean if he’ hurting that badly for money, he could just sell tickets to the thing! Either they come back with a cool story, or the body is never found! Win-win!
I think the success of this movie and the story that people are trying to tell surrounding it have blown the movie itself way out of proportion. Yes, I’m glad that a YouTube producer was given the chance to turn his vision into a feature length film, and it’s good for fresh-faced young filmmakers to be given shots like this, but at the end of the day, the movie itself is just fine. I don’t think it’s going to reinvent the horror genre or usher in Gen Z’s domination of the box office, but it is a perfectly satisfactory movie. It’s a serviceable premise that has moments of brilliance, but it’s not a particularly compelling story and the execution feels a little amateurish. It reminds me of the days where I would go to Blockbuster and just rent whatever had an R-rating in the horror section. Most of it wasn’t very good, but a lot were perfectly serviceable and had at least a few moments worth remembering. In fact, the movie I’d compare it most to is a classic of the mid-range horror genre; namely Cube from 1997. If you’re looking for a way to explain this movie to old people, it’s Cube but with disquieting liminal art design instead of proto-Saw traps, and while I’d still rank this a step below for its less than satisfying narrative, it has enough genuine imagination an intrigue to keep your attention all the way through.
What I will say about this movie is that it knows what its strengths are. The titular backrooms are an evocative setting that you can do so much with, and while the movie does feel a bit ponderous at times, it does give us enough time to explore this world and see the various tricks up its sleeve. You end up craving more of it as each twist and turn seems to tell a different story, and this at least gets us invested in the characters’ survival so that they can walk us through more of it. There’s limitless potential for any number of things to be discovered which is, at least partially, what made the idea of it so compelling when it first popped up on the internet. More often than not, the big budget studio treatment is an anathema to these kind of community built ghost stories, look no further than that terrible Slender Man movie for a recent example, but the money is well spent in its recreation of this iconic imagery and on the skilled hands with which it was shot. I was never a part of this particular subculture so I can’t say how accurate the portrayal is here, but it at least feels like it made the jump without many compromises and its all the better for it.
On the flipside, however, it doesn’t really know how to compensate for its shortcomings, and what they try to fill the gaps with feel incomplete and rather hokey. The idea of the Backrooms is, at best, an elevator pitch with some degree of cultural cache, so any story crafted from it would have to be built from the ground up. This is fine if you have a brilliant idea for what to do with such a setting, but that’s not what they’ve come up with. Instead, it feels like the worst of the recent trend of Elevated Horror, albeit with a much smaller scope in mind. For me, I found it pretentious as it tries to have something to say about relationships and human psychology, but it lands with a thud as the characters feel thin despite spending so much time trying to flesh them out, and the big confrontation is simultaneously cryptic and obvious; metaphors tortuously stretched over a pre-existing premise for want of a reason to be taken seriously. Honestly, a little more sleaze or grit would have gone a long way here as the movie works best on a sensory level and all the words coming out of people’s mouths feel like the first draft of a middling Alex Garland script. Leave the tortured American male psyche to movies better equipped to examine it and focus even more on the scary stuff around the oddly shaped corners.
Much like the Guilemo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, I think there’s a little too much love for the material here and I’d prefer something with a little more attitude. Young people and their art should be rebellious; it’s at its best when it’s demanding the rest of the world get on its level instead of chasing after the prestige of the old guard. Still, it’s clear that the filmmaker succeeded in what he was setting out to do which was to faithfully bring the amorphous idea of the Backrooms to the mainstream, and I can’t say that he did a bad job of it. I also can’t say that he did a spectacular job either as the end result never felt like it kicked into full gear and just kept sputtering out whenever things started to escalate. For a first time director, this is an impressive outing and I can see what people like about it, and for the most part I didn’t have a bad time with it. I would recommend it, but probably not with the expectations that this is the movie that broke Hollywood on a tiny budget. If The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, or My Big Fat Greek Wedding couldn’t do that, then I doubt this movie will.
The Reviewers Unite 