Backrooms

Backrooms joins the growing list of films made by directors who transitioned from YouTube to feature filmmaking. Directed by 21-year-old Kane Parsons, it presents itself as a high-concept film—perhaps so high-concept that grasping exactly what it is trying to say becomes a challenge. By the end, one is left wondering what the point of it all was

Kane Parsons, the debut director of Backrooms, is 20 years old. It is the sort of detail you want to hold against the film, but you cannot. Parsons made his name in high school, helming a YouTube series called Backrooms. Like the film, it grew out of a 2019 image of an empty yellow room: the patron saint of the internet’s endless fascination with liminal spaces, those transitional, in-between places that feel wrong the moment you find them empty. The leap from that to an A24 feature (the film is based on his series) should have flattened the whole thing into content. Instead, Backrooms turns out cannier and more searching than its origins, spending its runtime worrying at questions about memory and what it means to be lost, which are far older than the internet that taught Parsons how to make it.

Little comes closer to the approximation of a full empty life than perhaps a furniture store. Dining tables to be had family meals on, sofas to sink into, almirahs to hold possessions, beds to be slept in – all waiting for someone to take them home. Little comes closer to the approximation of an empty full life than perhaps an impersonal glass-and-concrete office space. Rows upon rows of people sitting behind screens doing identical work day after day – all waiting for somehow to make it home. In the Backrooms, the twain meet in the liminal space that the Internet calls it own, where real and fake symbiotically live off each other. It is fitting then that the film should be the creation of 20-year-old YouTube find Kane Parsons, and be steered into massive commercial success by A24, a studio with a nose for zeitgeist and the pocket for zillions.

The landscape of filmmaking has changed. So has the language of horror. Once defined by grand big-screen experiences, some of the most exciting and innovative horror content now emerges on YouTube. A prime example is filmmaker Kane Parsons’s Backrooms, which took the U.S. and horror communities worldwide by storm. Defying the notion that creativity peaks with age, the 20-year-old director’s feature adaptation delivers relentless terror without the backing of a massive budget, proving that atmosphere and imagination can be far more unsettling than scale. Set in 1990, Backrooms follows Clarke (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect who now runs the even more dubious Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a vast furniture store fronted by a pirate mascot with a wooden leg. Seeking therapy, Clarke begins sessions with Mary (Renate Reinsve), who notices patterns in his aggression and gradually grows curious about his mysterious claims. By the film’s third act, she uncovers what Clarke, his colleague Kat, and Kat’s boyfriend Bobby have been through, much of which we have already witnessed through a series of unsettling grainy camera footage. This time, Mary becomes our eyes and ears inside the abyss.