★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
The menacing, mesmerizing mind teaser that is “Backrooms” has its work cut out for it. The film’s 12-year-old director Kane Parsons (OK, he’s 20, but you get my point) thinks he can challenge the horror audience instead of just coddling it with blood splatter. I think we can all agree that the part of the brain that controls thinking does not get overworked by Hollywood. Yet “Backrooms,” for all its unnerving suspense, is an intellectual puzzle devised by a visionary trickster. Let’s say this about Kane Parsons—he’s diabolical.
He's persuaded two Oscar nominated actors—Chiwetel Ejiofer (“12 Years a Slave”) and Renate Reinsve (“Sentimental Value”)—to help bring his dazzling, disorienting nightmare with a script by Will Soodik to the big screen. How often does that happen for a rookie director? Try never.
Ejiofer excels as Clark, recently divorced and bitter about it. Clark runs a furniture store called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire that’s not exactly packing them in. The TV commercials he does dressed as a pirate only enhance Clark’s desperation. His boozing doesn’t help either.
Reinsve digs into the role of Dr. Mary Kline, Clark’s therapist (and, boy, does he need one). They role play the day his wife sent him packing. No wonder Clark has bad dreams that slowly morph into something resembling the reality of 1990 where holding to the ground while the ground keeps slipping is virtually impossible.
One day, an eventful one for sure, Clark discovers a wall in the backroom of his store. Imagine his shock when he touches the wall and then passes right through it, only to find more walls and more rooms bathed in yellow, flickering fluorescent light and carpeting so moldy you can almost smell it. It’s Dr. Mary who decides to follow her patient into the dark hole of his own isolation and psychosis.
This would be a good time to go back to go back to Parsons and the devious plans he’s been cooking up for years about liminal spaces. You know, spaces that exist outside their usual context, like school hallways, closed shopping malls or the Overlook Hotel in “The Shining,” spaces usually buzzing with activity but now devoid of people and sparking a surreal feeling of dread and dislocation.
Parsons, let me tell you, knows from dislocation and of monsters lurking on the periphery of the action. Back in 2022, this teen prodigy uploaded a horror short called “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” to YouTube where it went instantly and viral, inspiring nearly two dozen follow up shorts, countless fan interpretations and other works of digital art. “Severance,” anyone?
Imagine his shock when Parsons, barely 16, was contacted by A24—the indie studio of choice for cool kids—with the offer to turn his school project into a full-length feature film with a reported budget of $10 million and projections that his debut would double that number on its opening weekend alone. Just to show the difference in scale, Parsons used 3D software for his YouTube videos while over 30,000 square feet of backrooms were built for the movie. Big enough to get lost in, just like his movie.
An intellectual puzzle devised by a visionary trickster. Let’s say this about Kane Parsons— he’s diabolical.
With that mind, I will be stingy with spoiler details. Other actors, including Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell and Avan Jogia, join the exemplary Ejiofer and Reinsve in this bizarro odyssey. But I won’t say how. Parsons owes an artistic debt to camera wiz Jeremy Cox, editor Greg Ng and composer Edo Van Breeman, though Parsons himself collaborated on the eerie, elegant score. Hype is a dangerous thing, especially when it comes to comparisons. Orson Welles was just 25 when made his debut with the classic “Citizen Kane.” This new Kane (Parsons) was five years younger when he called “Action” for the first time.
Look, “Backrooms” will not change the course of world cinema. What it does do is introduce Parsons as a bracing new artistic voice in how movies look and sound. I’m thinking of the dream logic of David Lynch with “Eraserhead” and Charlie Kaufman with “Synecdoche, New York.” Astonishing in his imaginative reach, Parsons has a gift that deserves a chance to breathe and grow. Since horror gurus James Wan and Oz Perkins are among the producers, envious comments have already risen about the extent of their contribution.
Nonsense. “Backrooms” is Parsons’ baby. He’s tended it since its online infancy. He surely knows that gore hardliners might resent his brainy reserve and vice versa. Yet he plays by his own rules. Critical reaction so far has been up and down, as it always is when an artist takes initiative. Naysayers find “Backrooms” overwrought and underwhelming. And maybe sometimes it is. My high rating stems from the pleasure of watching Parsons walk the highwire of his own ambition. What are a few wobbles when someone shoots for the stars?
