Image: A24.

Over the last few years, I’ve been making an effort to break several of my own personal patterns. This includes my aversion to horror films. I used to tell people that it wasn’t horror what bothered me; it was what my imagination did after the images entered my consciousness. Once the images and concepts had a chance to roll over in a brain for a few hours, re-creating those scenes again and again, my mind would turn what I knew was fake into a real thing that exists and is looming in the dark just as I’m trying to become comfortable enough to sleep. (This, by the way, is similar to my process for writing these reviews.) That’s my pattern. I am trying to break this.

Luckily the resurgence of art horror, or elevated horror, over the last decade has made this genre much easier to watch. Films like Get Out, The Endless, and mother! occupy my brain with theme and metaphor, leaving less room for terrifying or grotesque imagery. Meanwhile, more obviously horrific films like Barbarian, Weapons, and The Substance at least feel more, begging your pardon here, substantive, offering a nice allegory before inevitably succumbing to horror conventions. As another entry in this genre, Backrooms finds a nice balance between psychological allegory and creeping dread. It’s a film which understands that, for most of us, disturbance comes from breaking what we’ve accepted as normal.

Every new set in ‘Backrooms’ is unsettling and amazing.
Image: A24.

In horror, what’s on screen is often less important than what’s off screen. Backrooms primarily accomplishes this through the use of liminal spaces: transitional locations we’re all familiar with devoid of the life which makes them familiar. Similar to Lumon Industries in the TV series Severance or the Oldest House in the game Control, Captain Clark’s Ottoman Empire (itself a confused mash-up of pirates and sultans) turns our understanding of how things are supposed to work against us. Beginning with a pile of impossible furniture, every new location discovered further disorients with chairs in impractical locations, walls and floors with banners and shoes stuck inside them, and just enough wires running through to let us know that we’re not alone down here. While not novel in itself, the set design in Backrooms is wonderfully disturbing. Each set of rooms offers some odd and striking images, from chairs stuffed down a hole in the floor to a tiny door set in the ceiling at the top of a staircase. We are familiar enough with this setting to know that everything is terribly, terribly wrong. This foreboding then amplifies every footstep and creak and flicker of shadow or light. If the inanimate objects down here are this jarring, what must the animate ones be?

As fits a film built on the absence of life, only five named characters appear in Backrooms’s narrative. As Clark, Chiwetel Ejiofor brings decades of gravitas to a part that could otherwise feel cliché. An early exchange with his therapist Mary Klein (Renate Reinvse) makes us immediately sympathize with Clark while also giving us everything we need to understand his journey through the film. Reinvse is similarly excellent in her role, bringing a subtle desperation informed through flashbacks of an early life with the mother who inspired her therapeutic approach. However, the film’s credibly is slightly broken when a woman born in California, and whose house we see demolished in the beginning, speaks with an accent that while not entirely Danish is definitely not southern Californian. Sadly, Shrinking’s Lutika Maxwell isn’t offered much, nor is Finn Bennett, in roles that feel like horror checklist items rather than narrative necessities, both of whom also open the door, so to speak, to the weakest element of Backrooms.

Sadly, half of the cast of ‘Backrooms’ is under-utilized.
Image: A24.

Prior to life as part of the elevated horror genre, Backrooms started as one of hundreds found footage films, albeit one directed by a teenager with a few of his friends. As a feature, Backrooms pays homage to this origin by beginning with a found footage sequence before later revising the tactic for the majority of Bennett and Maxwell’s screen time. Although well filmed, and nicely amplifying the suspense, the mix of third-person and first-person points of view implies that someone found this tape and is watching it at a later date. Yet, given the progression of the story, we know that this isn’t true, and a switch back to third person makes the entire found footage conceit unnecessary beyond the director seeking comfort in his personal pattern.

Director Kane Parsons displays an astonishing level of restraint for someone making his feature film debut at only twenty years old. Seriously. The film is set in 1990, meaning the director was still fifteen years away from being born. This fact may also account for some of the more shallow characterizations, the backslide into more comfortable techniques, and for some period details feeling inauthentic, at least according to my memory. Still, the steady climb in tension, the monotonous color, use of negative space, and the overall production display a refinement years beyond most debut directors, let alone those who aren’t even old enough to drink yet (a fact that according to Wikipedia will change just over two weeks after Backrooms is released so, happy birthday!). Yet beyond the film’s origin, or the director’s personal story, what makes Backrooms even more fascinating is that its uncanny valley-style production feels familiar in how wrong it is.

We know from the start that we are not alone in “Backrooms.”
Image: A24.

Immediately after first discovering the titular location, a frantic Clark explains that the rooms underground look like someone who has never seen a dog trying to draw a dog. We can describe the main features of a dog – floppy ears, fur, four legs, long snout, tail – but drawing one from secondhand description would make something about as accurate as a living room with a dozen chairs facing the walls. Our understanding of a living room or a dog relies so much upon our own experiences with these things that no one or nothing which lacks these experiences could ever recreate them.

One sequence in Backrooms wonderfully visualizes the process by which understanding fades through re-creation. That every time we attempt to make a copy of something we lose a piece of it. The next copy loses more pieces. The next loses more. Next loses more. Next more. More. Until all that’s left is the vague idea of a room, as though created by someone or something that has never experienced nor ever needs to experience a room. It’s this empty concept which then builds the understanding of the next generation of people who have yet to experience a room.

At this point, even those of us who actively avoid such things have seen dozen of pictures created by artificial intelligence. We’re familiar with its patterns, the uncanny qualities that mark it as wrong, as if trying to re-create something after only seeing a re-creation of that thing. A dog created by a machine that has never seen a dog. A face created by a machine that has never seen a face. A copy created by something that has only ever seen a copy, which then makes another copy, from which another copy is made, to make yet more copies, generating millions upon millions of copies of copies of copies spread and distributed through digital devices, given authority by ubiquity, because something must be true if everyone is told it’s true. Every dog has five tails. Every face has three pairs of eyes. Creations that have no intention or emotion, no theme or metaphor, no art or elevation. They just exist. Twisted and distorted beyond recognition until even we, the ones who have experienced the real thing, question our reality.

Piles of furniture feel wrong because we know furniture doesn’t pile… until we don’t.
Image: A24.

Humanity has patterns. We seek comfort and confirmation. We create ways to shift blame and make ourselves the victim. We succumb to laziness, following the path of least resistance even if that means a steady decline. We embrace anything that makes it easier for us to be comfortable and blameless. We absolutely refuse to ever consider the consequences of our actions before taking them. And when we finally become aware of these consequences – the hundreds of years of deforestation caused by industrialization, the environmental destruction of fossil fuels, the poverty and misery left after centuries of unchecked and uncontrolled economic expansion, the loss of air, water, and cognition just so that we can have an AI image of Jesus Christ wearing an American flag robe while holding an AR15 – we’ve become so dependent on our comforts that being without them feels wrong. Besides, it’s not our fault. We’re victims too. This is the pattern of the world. We are powerless to break it.

A third act exchange in Backrooms offers the opinion that the rooms are perhaps the most important discovery in history. When questioned, no answer is given. The rooms have a greater authority. Once you’re inside, you belong to them. It owns you. Your memory is no longer your own. It now belongs to the rooms to alter, twist, and distort until what you no longer know what you know. The creation consumes the creator.

The creation consumes the creator.
Image: A24.

Ultimately, Backrooms is not about the horror of seeing patterns broken, but in our own inability to break them. A misplaced chair, an odd door, or a roomful of couches aren’t frightening. They just exist. We assign them fear because we know that something is wrong. We can feel it. Yet, something within ourselves makes these breaks in accepted pattern unacceptable, disturbing, disquieting, horrifying. We imagine that whatever made these abominations must be so much worse. Something we need to run from, hide, escape. Something we need to seek comfort from, ease ourselves, fall back into our patterns. Numb ourselves. Tell ourselves that it’s okay. Talk to our therapists about it. Or, since our therapists will tell us that we have issues to work on, get ChatGPT to tell us that everything is going to be okay.

This is our pattern. We are comfortable. We are blameless. We are powerless.

It will consume us.

“Room” by Midjourney.
Image: A24.

Backrooms asks us to break our patterns. We don’t have to slide into mindless ease and comfort. To surrender what makes us human to something that has no concept of what it is to be a human. That we do, in fact, have the power to make ourselves what we choose. We are our minds, flawed and finite, and prone to over-active imagination though they may be. Even the images we create, the ones that keep us up at night, have a purpose. There is intention in their creation. They help inform who we are and how we act. Our memories are our own.

I used to tell people that it wasn’t horror that bothered me; it was what my imagination did in the hours after. I recognized this, and I am attempting to stop it. In Backrooms the horror isn’t what’s on screen. It’s what happens hours, days, months, years after. What happens without intention or emotion. While we seek comfort and ease. The horror isn’t in seeing that something is wrong: an empty space, an impossible table, or a mannequin sticking out of the floor. The horror is in recognizing that something is wrong, and doing nothing to stop it.

Rating: 4 / 5