Backrooms

Whatever their artistic merits, the commercial success of Kane Parsons' Backrooms and Curry Barker's Obsession is a truly heartening sign of life for the American film industry. Before the summer onslaught of sequels, retreads, and video game adaptations, it was very pleasing to film buff Biff that two original films from newcomers are runaway box office successes. After viewing Backrooms, I was particularly chuffed that such an abstract and avant leaning film has been embraced by the US public, particularly by those 35 and under. It is A24's biggest hit to date, already outgrossing Marty Supreme. Backrooms has a plot, but its chief attribute, which commences once Chiwetel Ejiofor discovers a portal to a parallel world in the basement of his furniture store, is Parsons' camera prowling the negative space of a world redolent of corporate offices and strip malls. This conveys a sense of dread that lingers despite the narrative seeming like a distended Twilight Zone episode. 

Ejofor plays Clark, a frustrated architect living in a mythical city in 1990 who manages a pathetic furniture store for his daily bread. He has recently undergone a painful divorce and attends therapy session with his doc, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). After Clark discovers the portal, he enlists two collegiate videographers to document what he has discovered. Unsurprisingly, the duo become the film's sacrificial lambs for a monster lurks in the maze of this mysterious kingdom. Mary Kline becomes concerned about Clark and stumbles upon the portal. Flashbacks of her childhood, when she was a prisoner in the house of her mad mother, illuminate her struggle to metaphorically and literally walk through windows. A single survivor is left at film's end. A high tech firm has been monitoring the parallel world and is able to make an extraction. A company pooh-bah (deftly played by Mark Duplass) debriefs the survivor, functioning much like Simon Oakland's character in Psycho. As in Psycho, the explanation given mystifies rather than clarifies.

The visual landscape of Backrooms is a picture of suburban desolation and anomie. Indeed, the suburban strip malls of America in 2026 are even more empty after the rise of internet retailers. As the musical group Priests put it:

                           I was jogging to a strip mall

                           I felt nothing at all

                          Nothing I can recall

                          Besides Dollar Tree, Sears and Thai Bistro

Even before we enter the film's Interzone, the portrait of 1990 America is depressing. The colors of the costumes and decor are subdued and ugly. The film is a symphony in taupe and off white. Even when a color like blue is used it is a subdued blue rather than a vivid one. This fits the emotional tenor of the film. Clark and Mary both live a lonely existence, each haunted by the demons of the past. Ejiofor and Reinsve limn their characters' stress and isolation superbly. I was somewhat distracted by Reinsve's Norwegian accent, but that is a very minor complaint.  

Master Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik have extrapolated Backrooms from Parsons' YouTube series of the same name. However, the idea for this project did not just emerge full blown like an Athena from the cheesypastaverse. There are antecedents. Mark Z. Danielewski's 2000 horror novel House of Leaves has a similar premise. While Parsons' characters travel horizontally into an alternative multiverse, Danielewski's descend vertically into darkness. With its labyrinthine tracking shots, Backrooms reminded me of Michael Snow's Wavelength and Kubrick's The Shining. Indeed, the labyrinth is the one of the central motifs in Kubrick's oeuvre. Regardless, I feel Backrooms can stand on its own. I don't think it is a great film, but it is a startling debut.